Kurtys Kidd

Kurtys Kidd has never been particularly good at staying in one lane.

Punk bassist. Rock guitarist. Songwriter. Producer. Actor. His path has run through some shady corners of the Canadian punk and alternative underground, with stops along the way at American college radio, SPIN Magazine, Little Steven’s Underground Garage and San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival.

But This Dirty Machine isn’t a retrospective. It’s a culmination. The result of everything that came and went along the way.

Kidd first emerged as a member of The Viletones, part of the lineage of Toronto’s first-wave punk scene. He later joined New World Disorder, playing bass, contributing as a songwriter and producing The Happy Destructive EP. The song “Messed Up” appeared both on the EP and on CFNY 102.1’s New Music Search compilation.

He next became guitarist and a principal songwriter in Vampire Beach Babes, producing Attack of the Killer Bikinis and Beach Blanket Bedlam. The latter found an audience on independent and college radio in the U.S. and Europe, while the band’s music also reached listeners through Little Steven’s Underground Garage. Along the way, Kidd co-wrote the title track for Troma Entertainment’s Tales From The Crapper with longtime collaborator Baron Marcus.

After leaving Vampire Beach Babes, Kidd and VBB keyboardist Julianne Partridge formed The Death Of Me. Kidd wrote or co-wrote every song on the album This Will Be and produced the record. The band was subsequently featured in SPIN’s “6 Bands to Watch” and appeared at San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival.

Through all of those incarnations, the constant has been making records: writing them, playing on them and producing them.

That thread now runs through Kidd’s solo work. This Dirty Machine was written, performed and produced by Kidd and mixed and mastered by Scotty Komer. The ten-song concept album grew out of a night spent at the edge of Osoyoos, British Columbia. At a low point in his life, Kidd drove out into the desert and spent the night beneath an enormous sky, questioning his choices and his place in the world.

The album takes that experience outward, through isolation, regret, love, mortality and perspective. Stars, radio waves, distant galaxies and the machinery of the universe recur throughout.

Its title carries a double meaning. We are the dirty machines: imperfect biological creatures, raw and exposed to everything life throws at us. But Earth itself is a dirty machine too. An extraordinary system that runs constantly beneath us while humanity steadily dirties the very thing we depend upon for everything.

The lead single, “Out On The Spiral Arm,” brings that enormous scale back to something intimate. No matter how far we retreat when we’re hurt, connection can still find us if we remain open to it.

With This Dirty Machine, Kidd isn’t looking backward at where he’s been. He’s using it as fuel for wherever he goes next.