Bentley's Bandstand
Give this drummer some, because it’s not every day someone who’s spent a majority of their musical life sitting behind a drum kit steps out front and makes this kind of splash. Dennis Diken is best known as the beatkeeper for the Smithereens. Granted, he contributed a lot more than just a savvy knowledge of percussion in his position in that band, but who knew he had all this inspiration and talent hiding inside? There are many moments on Late Music when you’d swear a long-lost Brian Wilson album had been discovered, or something by any number of other pop luminaries. This is serious business, not to mention almost all the instrumental prowess is provided by Diken and his partner in crime Pete DiBella. The music they create feels like a careening ride down a mountainside, starting with “The Sun’s Gonna Shine in the Morning” and continuing through the wildly inventive “Long Lonely Ride,” “Fall into Your Arms,” “Don’t Let Me Sleep Too Long” and, finally, “Tell All the Fools.” There is the exciting element of the mad scientist on these recordings, because it’s obvious how much imagination went into all of them. Diken and DiBella are students of pop music in all its permutaitons, probably starting with the early Phil Spector productions and continuing right up to the most current progressions. They have a way of building songs from scratch that demonstrates in the right hands, a studio has no limits. Which is what Bell Sound might refer to. The Smithereens always had a way of taking rootsy styles and making them bigger. Diken goes that one better, and takes big sounds and amplifies those even more. The next time you want to find out what the future would sound like in the hands of someone who loves the past but would never want to be stuck there, find this album. It’s all here, and more.
