RAISE THE SAILS!
Dead Meadow, London Cargo, August 9th

Well there’s all only so many times one can say such a thing before it lose all meaning, but man alive, Dead Meadow are GREAT. That’s the long and short of it really.

Dead Meadow are a band I feel like approaching not with hyperbolic blog-crit, but via the kind of Wordless Rock Dude Awe Moment that, issued with appropriate solemnity, speaks with more than authority than a thousand over-analytical reviewers ever could…

“Dead fucking MEADOW, man..”

(Respectful silence and nodding of long-haired heads.)

Sadly, Dead Meadow rarely seem to achieve these moments of awe-recognition that they so richly deserve, often seeming instead to fall frustratingly between the cracks dividing current music/fashion cults. Too drugged and riff-heavy for run of the mill indie kids, yet too nuanced and starry-eyed (read: wimpy) for the metal/noise-heads, they nonetheless hold the fort of a certain unique position on the musical landscape, a fort wherein they stand guard over my personal conception of Thee Perfect Psychedelic Rock.

Whole swathes of the musical landscape are now of course occupied by those trading off various sub-genre-designated permutations of ‘churning riffage’, ‘heaviosity’ and the like, as stoner guitar-dude culture and unashamed ‘70s metal worship bleed carelessly across into indie-rock crit respectability, avant-noise envelope-pushing, ambient texture worship and god only knows what else. Chances are you could throw a brick somewhere in the vicinity of the Camden Underworld of an average evening and hit a member of some band who are - on a practical, measurable level - heavier, or slower, or gnarlier, or more intense, or more spaced out, or more bad-ass or whatever than Dead Meadow.

But….. who fucking cares, frankly. Guys the world over can decamp to the nearest desert with enough ampage to decimate a football stadium and grind out variations on ‘Iron Man’ till they’re blue of face and black of lungs, but it won’t achieve much. It’ll all sound a bit forced, a bit constipated, a bit pointless. It won’t change the essential fact that, every generation, the holy hand reaches down from on high and appoints one – maybe two, or three if we’re lucky – groups as custodians of The Riff.

Black Sabbath had it through most of the ‘70s, obviously.

Sleep and Electric Wizard were standing guard over some serious Riff during the ‘90s, if I’m any judge.

And now, Dead Meadow have The Riff. Scoff all you like metalheads, I don’t care, it’s fact.

The Riff is impossible to define in terms of the notes, guitar sounds etc. you’d imagine would be relevant to such discussion – try all you like, you won’t get it that way. The Riff is the reason why the first side of 2003’s definitive “Shivering King and Others” doesn’t sound like an album by a Lovecraft-referencing heavy psyche band, and instead sounds like PURE SEX. No fooling!


Summarised biogs often seem to peg Dead Meadow as a “70s retro” band, which must annoy the hell out of them. I can see where the label originates of course – a sanctified reverence for vintage equipment and recording techniques and a knowledge of how to use them properly to achieve the perfect expression of THAT particular expansive, slightly disembodied fuzzy-round-the-edges-with-the-bass-knob-on-max dusty vinyl guitar thrum, dredging up ancestral memory of a thousand suburban evenings with the joints aflame and the headphones on, in thrall to “Led Zep IV” and “Master Of Reality”. You know what I mean? But, god only knows, there was nobody around in the ’70s actually making records that sounded much like Dead Meadow! If there had been, their artifacts would be going for $thousands$, effortlessly eclipsing the killer rep of comparatively puny collector-cults like Flower Travellin’ Band or what have you.

Far from being a mere “retro” concern, ‘Meadow take a similar – if more consistently successful – approach to their musical heritage as bands like Oakley Hall and Espers; carefully internalizing the distinctive sounds and atmospheres of their deepest influences and blasting them back outward in new permutations to essentially create the music they think SHOULD have existed during their teenhood.

But Ok, I’m supposed to be talking about the gig here, so let’s get on with it:

Perfect, pre-meditated textures and general heftiness of sound are obviously a significant part of Dead Meadow’s collective whack, and as such I find myself demanding every ‘Meadow gig be a perfect, hermetically-sealed entity beyond the messy and inconsistent reality of yr average rock gig set-up. And predictably enough some element of the experience is usually found wanting; last time I caught a headline set from the band, in Nottingham back in… Christ, it must have been 2005 I think… their performance was superb, but proceedings were muffled throughout by shitty, jerry-rigged, TOO SMALL amps. I know, I know… but with a band like this, these things are paramount.

No such problems are in evidence at Cargo thankfully, as bassist Steve Kille plugs into the kind of Ampeg you could bury a gorilla in and Jason Simon fiddles with an elaborate set-up incorporating a full-size Orange cabinet and head, a Fender Twin, a vintage tape echo and some kind of electronic drone machine.

Things still aren’t perfect; the vocals are waaay low for one thing, and from my position at the front of the stage I think I’m getting a lot of direct blare from the guitar amps that’s drowning out the bass and drums to some extent, but shouldn’t really complain because oh my god, that guitar blare was PERFECTION. Simon has perhaps my favourite tone/sound/etc of any modern day guitarist, with sustained low-end fuzz-notes echoing in the air for mini-eternities, throwing out ghosts of overtones more rarefied and beautiful than anything you’d ever expect to hear beaten out of sweaty electric guitar strings, and his wah-wah divebombing conjuring THE exact audio equivalent of a pupil dilating in slow motion. And so forth.

Having my senses almost entirely consumed at close quarters by this guy’s blare for an hour was….. too fucking good. Like I was saying: Dead fuckin’ MEADOW, man.

(silence.)

(You can buy a print of this poster from Chris S.)

What else to say? Well there’s a hell of a lot more excitement to this band’s live incarnation than just waxing lyrical about guitar tone, and when they really hit their stride halfway through this set, I swear, Stephen McCarty is drumming like the ocean and Kille is bassing like the goddamn whale. Form is streeetching, fuzz is flying, groove is in the collective heart in the best possible heavy-rock-band way, and it’s only the lack of a second guitarist for Simon to bounce stuff off (whatever happened to that other guy who played on ‘Feathers’?) that stops the whole thing taking off into the kind of astral projectin’ improvisational nirvana so often promised by psychedelic rock, and so rarely delivered. It’s a great show!

The crowd is dense, sub-culturally diverse, enthusiastic, and it is MOVING, which is a real kick to see, because I didn’t think Dead Meadow were actually very popular in the world at large. Clearing the hair from my eyes for a minute or two, I can see a gang of girls on the other side of the stage, dancing. Not head-banging or mock-belly dancing or anything you might deem aesthetically appropriate, but locked into a slowed down, tranced out, joyful nightclub grind.

A gang of girls, dancing. To Dead Meadow. Who are playing in front of my face.

God I love being in the world.

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Dead Meadow’s Peel Session, recorded March 2001:

Dusty Nothing

Drifting Downstream

Good Moanin'

Rolling Thunder

Labels: Dead Meadow, live reviews, Psychedelia