The Dead C, “The White House” (Siltbreeze, 1995)
This 1995 release is generally regarded to be one of the dirt-encrusted jewels of The Dead C’s frequently perplexing discography. For the most part, however, that place of honor is almost entirely due to just one song: the lumbering and smoldering epic “Outside.” A fairly strong case can also be made for one or two other pieces, but the remainder celebrates the trio at their messy, contrarian, hookless, and indulgent height. Some listeners will likely find those pieces brilliantly annoying, but most (like me) will probably find them exasperatingly pointless and half-assed. On the bright side, “Outside” is almost longer than all of the weaker pieces combined and it is about as good as noisy guitar music gets.
In what can only be described as a classic Dead C move, The White House opens in singularly obnoxious and off-putting fashion. Few artists are less concerned with putting their best foot forward than these guys, a fact borne out by the one-two anti-punch of “Voodoo Spell” and “The New Snow.” For its part, “Voodoo” literally sounds like two minutes of someone just messing around with a new pedal they bought or an excerpt from some justifiably forgotten noise cassette from the early ’80s.
The following “New Snow” is initially a lot more promising, as it seems like the blown-out wreckage of cool rock song pregnant with possibility. Instead of developing into something better, however, it becomes a near-unlistenable 12-minute spew of masturbatory synth noodling. It is the sort of thing that is so terrible that I am forced to wonder what kind of stuff did NOT make the album. Later, I am similarly perplexed by the 1-minute celebration of hollow plunking that is “Aime to Prochaine Comme toi mem.” For a six-song album, three worthless songs is fairly unforgivable, no matter how short two of them are.
Thankfully, the remaining three pieces are a different breed altogether, aside from still being characteristically messy and lo-fi. The first (and least) of the trio (“Your Hand”) sets the template, taking rock music into an appealingly mumbly, dirge-y, hissing, and jangling place. It is a perfectly fine piece, if a bit plodding, but it is easily surpassed by what follows.
That said, the plodding pace is kind of the point, as The Dead C are at their best when they sound like a live recording of an otherwise great band totally falling apart (or at least not caring at all what they sound like): guitars stop and start seemingly randomly, the drummer is trying to play as little as possible, the singer sounds half-asleep, whatever structure there is quickly crumbles, and the guitar solos are indulgent bursts of cacophony. By all rights that should be a uniformly awful aesthetic, but the trio sometimes alchemically transforms that mess into something that sounds almost impossibly cool and bad-ass. “Bitcher,” for example, has an actual chord progression and a heavy, sludgy groove, but then it is all gleefully sabotaged with overzealous flanger use that makes it sound like the band is being slowly sucked into a black hole.
The White House‘s final piece is its clear zenith, as well as a very solid pick for the single best song that The Dead C ever wrote (though that honor probably goes to Harsh ’70s Reality‘s “Love” for me). In a general sense, “Outside” does not do anything particularly different from the other “songs,” aside from boasting a clearer, stronger vocal melody. In all other respects, it sounds exactly like The Dead C, only the best version possible: recording seemingly started with the song already underway, the “beat” is lumbering at best, the vocals are half-mumbled, there are only a couple of chords played ad infinitum, and everything is heard through a sheen of static and stuttering, snarling guitar squall.
That is admittedly slightly reductive, as there are some weirdly beautiful buried or chirping guitar parts, but the secret formula otherwise seems to be: 1.) come up with a few cool-sounding chords, 2.) add a decent vocal melody, 3.) turn it all into a smoking wreckage, and 4.) make sure it goes on for a long time. I do not quite grasp why duration works in The Dead C’s favor, but it does: at nearly 20 minutes, the sizzling, escalating entropy of “Outside” becomes somehow transcendent and hypnotic.
I wish I could say that the rest of the album approached similar heights, but it is crazy to complain that The White House only achieves ragged, stumbling genius once, since no one else has quite achieved anything like it (not that people are exactly queuing up to emulate these guys). Ultimately, The White House is far from an essential album, but “Outside” is a masterpiece of underground rock at its most magnificently fucked-up.
Listen here.
