Dubai's Bring Out Your Dead is a wildly eclectic endeavour

Bring Out Your Dead (Independent)

Perhaps determined to get reviewers reaching for their thesauruses, Dubai proudly describes itself as genre-bending purveyors of “hyphen-music at its best”. That’s advance warning that the coed four-piece doesn’t specialize in straight-up garage rawk or three-chord punk.

The five-song Bring Out Your Dead EP is indeed an eclectic affair, so eclectic that not even a degree in advanced music-journalism hyphenation will completely do it justice. While “Bring Out Your Dead” lyrics like “A dumpster full of gasoline and a match/Throw in our apartment” sound like something from anarcho-punks the Casualties, the track is a weird hybrid of smooth-vocals jazz and summer-breeze MOR. “Relapse” combines lyrics about combat boots, tattoos, and the devil’s smile with ethereal Lilith-friendly vocals and distortion-lite punk guitars, while “Inside Voices” hints at an eternal indebtedness to prog-funk, children’s-choir calypso, and circa-’92 alt-pop.

All that probably makes Dubai sound a little more exotic and boundary-pushing than the band is, but still, if you’re convinced that you’ve heard it all before, Bring Out Your Dead is a good reminder you haven’t.