by Ned RaggettThe appeal of a live-in-the-studio recording to rock bands has long been something fetishized by both creators and audience -- the idea being that one gets all the 'real' sense of the band without having to worry about minor details like beer spilled on one's crotch or some sweaty guy going YEAH BRO! in one's ear. (Then again, people might fetishize about that too.) On their 2008 album Dirty Versions, We Versus the Shark take that approach on a set of songs that wear all the signifiers properly (loud, garagey, thrashed) but throw in a careful restraint and love of textures at points (check the feedback during the quiet moments of I Am the President of the World) that makes them come across as the more straightforward cousins of, say, Brainiac. They're nowhere near as crazily wired and weird, despite having a nice line in gang shout screams and wails, but songtitles like I Am the Contempt Machine aren't too far removed from I Am a Cracked Machine while the prominence of the bass and the choppy guitar squeals on Mr. Ego Death add to the ghost of the ghost of post-punk feeling at work without sounding like Yet Another Interpol Clone. Hearing moments where a more scraggly vocal rubs up against the cleaner, stranger feeling of those guitar parts, such as Dogs, and the back and forth between vocalists Samantha Paulsen and Luke Fields on the brilliant Gothic Y'All (opening line: All the kids were mortified by my dusty gray skull), plus the keyboard break, is some kind of New Wave brilliance refiltered for a new century.