We Have You Surrounded is an album broadly focused on the theme of urban paranoia. Whether it's via the straight-forward grime rock of "I Hear the Sirens", the bleak, martial outlook conveyed in covering Dead Moon's 1992 classic "Fire in the Western World" or the wistful, Judgment Day, album-closer "La Fin du Monde" the record, coupled with artwork and lettering by Emmy-Award winning artist Gary Panter, takes on Armageddon with all the abandon of a conspiracy theorist living off-the-grid.
The unarguable centerpiece of the disc is the song "Leopardman at C&A". With lyrics by famed graphic novelist Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen) and intended for seminal goth pioneers Bauhaus, lead Dirtbomb Mick Collins put music to the words and the end result is a beautiful pairing of strong, vibrant post-apocalyptic prose and propulsive, thunderous punk rock.
References to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and the theoretical concept of "race to the bottom" pepper the disc while the music is standard Dirtbombs fare…that is, equal doses of high-energy Detroit rock and roll paired with Collins' vibrant, soulful vocals that combine to form what Time Out magazine has called "full-tilt garage-reared genius."
We Have You Surrounded is the first full-length album of new material from the Dirtbombs since 2003's pivotal Dangerous Magical Noise and they already have four non-album singles slated for release in 2008.
Since the band's inception in 1992 the Dirtbombs have won over dozens of fans. In more recent years, they've been named Spin magazine's #10 best live band in the world and had their cover of "Chains of Love" hand-picked by artist/director Julian Schnabel to be featured prominently in his critically-acclaimed film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. They've also showed no regret in selling one of their songs to a commercial for Walmart.
We Have You Surrounded tracklist:
- It's Not Fun Until They See You Cry
- Ever Lovin Man
- Indivisible
- Sherlock Holmes (originally by Sparks)
- Wreck My Flow
- Leopardman at C&A
- Fire in the Western World (originally by Dead Moon)
- Pretty Princess Day
- I Hear the Sirens
- They Have Us Surrounded
- Race to the Bottom
- La Fin du Monde
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