Customer Reviews

Harsh 70's Reality CD

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Even condensed onto one CD (it was originally a dbl-LP) this rec. stands as the most definitive statement of DC's quiet stand at the pinnacle of the celebrated nz scene. Straddling the mangled abject pop-folk of the Eusa Kills LP (probably the best place to start if you're a pop fan and can find it) and the psychotic mosquito drones of Iannis Xenakis when his studio craps out and he has to record on his walkman (a la Bruce Russell's solo project A Handful of Dust), this whole record has the kind of sheer momentum which only an exceptional band can muster. Hard to think of a band outside of the jazz idiom where three such distinct musical personalities have combined to make such a world-defining space of their own. If this sounds even remotely interesting, don't hesitate.

with an overall creepy feel and stunning range of the dead c. vocabulary, this fabulous cd demands an emphatic 'thumbs up' to anyone disturbed enough to appreciate "noise" that "rocks".

Given that I spent more $$ to get a used copy of this very rare oop release than I ever spent before on a single-disc CD, this did not exactly set me on fire once I played it. Still, respected savants like Steven Malkmus anointed this as a holy grail replica, so I figured I had to track it down. It's pretty much dominated by processed noise-rock, if in (except track one) shorter fashion.

Three songs were left off that appear on the vinyl, unfortunately. These may have salvaged what I hear from these eight CD features as too-lazy an attempt at art-rock meets sonic mayhem. It takes too few risks to be noticed or admired. Outtakes from this album, by the way for completists, appear on the wonderfully titled "Peace Love Hope et al." odds-and-sods collection from Shock Records that appeared in 1997/8. I am patient with this type of calculated casualness belying meditated planning, but the results this time for The Dead C don't pack the same concentrated pleasure that I find on their other discs. Repeated listenings have not opened up any light into the murky and half-scratched depths of this album.

The Dead C shone on the earlier, more rough-hewn nearly folk/Eno meets The Fall/Stooges/Sonic Youth/Can attack of their previous Eusa Kills album, or such harmony beneath the disruption on later work like New Electric Music. Instead, the appealing half-hour rumbling saunter of "Driver UFO" gives way to ramshackle songs that fail to live up to whatever expectations that caused me to spend a lot of dough on these songs. If you want to hear Dead C at their best, try the other albums I mentioned as well as Tusk, which probably best blends their disparate influences.

"If the Earth were a globe, there certainly would be -- if we could imagine the thing, to be peopled all around-'antipodes:' 'people who,' says the dictionary, 'living exactly on the opposite side of the globe to ourselves, having their fee [sic] opposite to ours' - people who are HANGING DOWN, HEAD DOWNWARDS while we are standing head up? But since the theory allows to travel to those parts of the earth where the people are said to hand head downward, and still to fancy ourselves to be heads upwards, and our friends whom we have left behind us to be heads downwards, it follows that the WHOLE THING IS A MYTH - A DREAM - A DELUSION - and a snare, and, instead of there being any evidence at all in this direction to substantiate this popular theory, it is plain proof that the Earth is Not A Globe."