HELL IS NOW LOVE

The Dead C – Vain, Erudite & Stupid: Selected Works 1987 – 2005 (BadaBing)

I saw the Dead C an absolute age ago, supporting Sonic Youth. I seem to remember they were good – they played guitar and bass and drums whilst twiddling with a formidable looking rack-mounted set-up that made whatever they were doing with their guitar, bass and drums sound like one big, immersive pile of noise. Good memories of that, together with the almost supernatural reverence in which this New Zealand band are held in certain psyche/noise circles, prompted me to check out this ‘sensibly priced’ retrospective of their work.

It’s chronologically ordered, and dear god, the ‘80s stuff is horrible – imagine the early DIY Half Japanese records if instead of crazy fun-loving dudes they’d been severe depressives with high art ambitions. Tracks begin with a kinda furtive basement scraping and build up into vicious, narcoleptic thud-fests, like cavemen trying to do Spacemen 3 and failing. The singing – which generally accompanies the quiet scraping sections - sounds like the guy from Simple Minds being fucked with a bottle. Unwelcome imagery I realise, but it’s pretty unpalatable stuff we’re dealing with here.

Having had my fill of that, I give the second disc – chronicling the band’s more recent work – a go. Hmm, well, the bass and drums seem to have largely disappeared, as has the singing, thank god. What’s left is a lot of menacing rumble and long sections of what sounds like a guitar plugged into a DOD distortion and a really wrecked old amp being held by the neck and dragged back and forth across the floor like a vacuum cleaner… in a fairly half-hearted and depressed sort of way. Ho-hum.

That a lot of fairly obtuse and abstract noise can summon up such concrete feelings of misery and futility in the casual listener is in a sense a vindication of The Dead C’s artistic relevance / success, and if you’re big into Wolf Eyes and Jandek and whacked out noise tapes you’ll probably dig this sort of nonsense. And frankly you’re welcome to it – listening to this is like spending all day at the doctors and leaving without a prescription.