The title has the feel of a mantra about it, as if it might be something Shayne Carter has repeated to himself during the seven years since he last made an album. It’s been so long that the man who was once hailed as this country’s most likely rock star now has to reintroduce himself. Not only that, he has completely altered the parameters of his music. His previous band, Straitjacket Fits, broke up without fulfilling their promise as the last great hope of Dunedin guitar rock. But Carter could have ridden the momentum they created by promptly launching another axe-wielding line-up. Instead he cleared the decks, and began a long process of finding, and then refining, a whole other concept. And those who hailed Carter as the last guitar hero needn’t be disappointed either. On repeated listening, one realises there is much more guitar here than initially appears. But instead of what Carter once called "the anthemic school of glory chords", you’ll find looped riffs that peck and scratch like something out of Sly Stone, shards of notes that might be the fallout from a Hendrix detonation. Of course Carter isn’t alone in this brave new world of virtual rock. It’s similar to the one Radiohead shifted into with Kid A, that Portishead have inhabited from the start, and that German groups like Can sketched out decades ago. One might even be tempted to see Carter’s electronic shift as opportunism, latching onto post-rock electronica before the rock ‘n’ roll boat goes down forever. But it’s not really like that. As Carter sings in just one of the album’s many enduring cuts, "it’s all evolution". Dimmer’s debut has been a long and perhaps difficult time in the making but it emerges with its own uneasy beauty.
