Dial-7’s Debut CD Takes a Broad View

*** Dial-7

”. . . yesterday was allday”

133 Records

Freedom of choice is what you’ve got if you’re a pop fan today, and given the success of such stylistic mixers-and-matchers as Sublime, No Doubt and 311, freedom of choice is what many fans want.

Dial-7’s six-song debut CD has a lot of what the masses flocking to smorgasbord-rock have been wolfing down, and it’s served up with both the musical flavor to entice and the lyrical intensity to provide some serious thematic nourishment once the taste buds have been teased.

The five-member band serves up rap in several varieties, with Shauny B providing the town-crier bark of a Public Enemy, and Michael Lord the tunefully embellished, husky-voiced singsong of an ace Jamaican toaster.

Behind them cranks a strong hard-rock power trio that avoids tromping hard just for the sake of tromping hard, and instead comes up with riffs and textures that accentuate the songs’ meanings.

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Dial-7, whose members all share a house in Laguna Canyon, comes off as a musical companion to those recent surveys of college students that reveal how much pressure kids today are feeling. The self-financed CD’s leadoff track, “Faster,” is a funky, propulsive number that plunges deep into the contemporary problem of too much sex, too much drugs, too much information, too much everything. “We go a little faster, ‘cause it really doesn’t matter, pom-pom,” Lord intones on a great, catchy refrain that’s more fatalistic than ironic; guitarist Billy Roan’s sirenlike riff drives home the alarm.

“Present Day” alludes to both Genesis and Revelation as it ponders the apocalypse and hopes for redemption: “Panic, error, so much terror / Bombs goin’ off, I’m gettin’ scareder.” Roan kicks it off with an apt allusion to Hendrix’s “Red House,” a blues tune about an arson.

“One to Grow On” focuses on the contradictions between indulgence and moral awareness that Sublime’s Brad Nowell explored so memorably. Here, the narrator admits to being led astray by his impulses but can’t shake the knowledge that we’re all accountable for what we do: “The soul that’s human in me is fighting with the human, it’s plain to see.”

Dial-7 hasn’t been immune to the craziness it portrays: Stephen Lord, known as Kid Bone, was one of the group’s rappers before his death last year in a car wreck; he was one of three passengers killed while riding with a 17-year-old girl who had been drinking. Kid Bone is heard on two rough demo recordings, one hewing closely to the rap romanticism of LL Cool J’s “I Need Love,” the other a trenchant, Dr. Dre-influenced commentary on the hopelessness that plunges some kids into the moral abyss of gang life. His loss is a sadness Dial-7 carries into what could be a very bright future.

(Available from Dial-7, 1108 W. La Entrada Circle, Anaheim, CA 92801. [714] 774-9947.)

* Dial-7, Spigot, Vitamin L and Salmon play tonight at 8 at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. $7-$9. (714) 957-0600.

Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.