2024 re-press, dbl LP
Back again with way more than you deserve, the Dead C's towering monument of/to the early 90s New Rock Lexicon. Technically their fourth LP, and first album to be released by a US label, it's not insignificant it arrived the year after punk broke, a rip-it-up-and-start-again moment of anti-formalist rock dynamics that offered up new ground before most were understanding the one they were currently stood up. We're talking real scorched fucking earth aesthetics. Radio mic vocals. Piano-down-the-stairs drums. Infinite horizon guitar delay. The sky falling down and all the world is ablaze. Aint it funny when the vanguard can sound so much like the end? There's a touch of the Wagnerian Gesampkunstwerk to Harsh 70s Reality, too, a total art work of monolithic scope (a double LP, too big for a single CD, even) that's faceless, non-hierarchical and panoptic, the paradoxical void to be lived inside and consumed by, an idea even played out in that abstracted monochrome artwork that looks like a tv static portal to their devastated plain. Grandiose words for a grandiose record, yes. But they don't make them like this anymore because they never really made them like this before. If you've got it already, well done. If not, clock in now. Utterly ruinous.
