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The Dead C

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The Dead C, “Rare Ravers” (Ba Da Bing, 2019)

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The Dead C have been on an impressive hot streak in recent years, so it was a reasonably safe bet that I would be delighted yet again by Rare Ravers. However, I was definitely not expecting such a revelatory leap forward this deep into the band’s career. Immodestly described as “recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space,” this album feels like it was conscientiously sculpted to ravaged perfection in an actual studio and it sounds absolutely amazing. As it turns out, The Dead C’s long history of rehearsal tape-level sound quality and shambolic, messy self-indulgence concealed the fact that they were secretly an extremely tight band capable of unleashing firestorms of howling guitar noise with the precision of a scalpel. I imagine some fans are still holding out hope that the band will someday return to writing actual songs with lyrics and vocals, but this album is an instant classic as far as I am concerned.

Much the recent Armed Courage and Trouble albums, Rare Ravers is roughly composed entirely of 20-minute pieces that each fill an entire side of vinyl, though in this case there is a two-minute interlude (“Waver”) separating them. The opening salvo, “Staver,” erupts with a characteristic snarl of distortion and feedback, but Robbie Yeats’ insistently steady and unwavering snare and high-hat rhythm quickly cuts through the maelstrom and drags the song forward through the buzzing, crackling wreckage. That howling mass of distorted ruin never goes away (this is a Dead C album, after all), but in this case it turns out to be the mere foundation for something more structured and compelling rather than the sole raison d’être. 

That said, the omnipresent snarl and sputter still play an absolutely crucial role: if I saw a cool art show where the gallery was shuddering and collapsing around me, that context would be every bit as memorable and essential to the experience (if not more so) than the art I was ostensibly focused on. In this instance, the nod to structure and an overarching vision is quite a modest but effective one, as “Staver” is anchored by a repeating bent note that sounds like a deep, anguished moan. Notably, the piece briefly seems to collapse into directionless noodling around the halfway point, but that proves to be a cunning feint, as the smoldering ruins soon spring to life with a flurry of atypically sharp and audible drumming. The resurgent piece then goes on to finish in strong fashion, as Yeats’ return signals the beginning of an unexpected second act in which the hollow animal moan of the first half slowly converges with a wobbling, pulsing, and insistent swell of distorted feedback.

Following a brief descent into the shuffling, sputtering psych-murk of “Waver,” the album’s superior second half is ushered in with the sputtering sludge avalanche of “Laver.” Again, that is fairly well-covered Dead C territory, but searing howls of strangled feedback soon start viscerally streaking through the chaos as a ramshackle groove lazily starts to cohere. The recording quality plays an essential role here, as the recurring blasts of snarling guitar noise are beautifully intense and physical. That proves to be fortunate, as the rest of the song completely drops out for a while, leaving only a series of howling noise eruptions punctuated by stretches of near silence. After that, it briefly dissolves into an interlude that sounds like a panning and undulating shortwave radio transmission. The piece soon lurches back to life though, cohering into a slow, heavy groove of muscular drums and snatches of clean, melodic guitar. The roiling entropy underneath is the real show, however, as it sounds like there are blood-thirsty noise demons attempting to tear their way through the veil of distortion. 

Again, the crispness and clarity of the recording plays a major role, as creaking of strings and the intricacies of the feedback squalls are able to gradually seize the foreground from both the beat and the melody. That is optimal, as Michael Morley and Bruce Russell unleash an absolutely glorious tour de force of screaming and distorted noise squall. Lest anyone get too concerned that The Dead C are approaching perfectionism or compositional rigor, however, “Laver” ends by being abruptly cut off mid-note. Maybe that actually is perfect though, as the only appropriate way for this album to end was probably for an amplifier to explode or the recording desk to short out from signal overload.

It feels very wrong to describe a Dead C album as flawless, as the band’s aesthetic has always been a fundamentally broken, corroded, and deconstructed one, so I will instead say that Rare Ravers is an album that is impressively devoid of any wasted time, directionless meandering, unrealized potential, or half-baked ideas. I was similarly struck by the volcanic power that this threesome can unleash when they are focused and allow some degree of professionalism to creep into their recording process. 

The Dead C have always been great at sounding like a shambling, jagged, and brilliant mess of a band, yet the occasions where they could rightfully be described as “face-melting” have been few and far between. Rare Ravers is legitimately face-melting during its howling crescendos. Similarly, the sheer ingenuity of Morley and Russell warrants praise as well, as the two have somehow managed to avoid repeating themselves again and again despite their hyper-constrained palette of blown-out bass and feral feedback squall. It is like watching a magician keep pulling rabbits out of a hat that cannot possibly contain any more rabbits. The Dead C have been a fitfully great band for decades, but they have truly defied the odds and blossomed into a reliably formidable and tirelessly evolving unit over the last several years. For now, Rare Ravers feels like a high-water mark, but I have no doubt that Morley, Russell, and Yeats will soon surpass it if they continue on their present trajectory.

Listen here.

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The Dead C, “Trouble” (Ba Da Bing, 2016)

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This latest opus captures The Dead C at their most endearingly perverse, brilliant, and anti-virtuosic, as they have somehow managed to craft a double album without actually having any conventional content at all: no real riffs, no hooks, no grooves, and no songs (unless some mumbling in a sea of feedback counts). That approach seems to tailor-made to alienate most potential new listeners, but the towering monolith of guitar squall that is Trouble is an absolute delight for the faithful like myself. These five sprawling and amorphous pieces sound like someone dropped napalm on rock music, leaving nothing but a smoldering, heaving, and howling wreckage. Occasionally something resembling a melody will emerge from the blown-out entropy, but the album’s real appeal is its visceral chaos. In some ways, this may very well be The Dead C’s finest album yet.

The trio does not waste any time at all in establishing their malign intent, as the opening “One” erupts with a stammering two-note riff amidst a roaring gale of white noise, then the almost-riff disappears entirely to leave a gnarled miasma of distortion and feedback bolstered by Robbie Yeats’ wandering and fitfully spirited drumming. Such a formula hardly seems like ideal grist for a 20-minute song, but somehow Michael Morley, Bruce Russell, and Yeats make it work, seamlessly ebbing into interludes of lazily sputtering guitar noise and almost-vocals, then building back up to eruptions of churning and formless density. 

Unexpectedly, however, the piece ends with an eerily beautiful coda of quivering feedback. Dynamic wizardry and feedback-wrangling aside, I am also particularly fascinated by Yeats’ bizarre drumming choices, as he continually rides the line between lunatic and genius, seemingly losing interest in his beats almost instantly yet somehow maintaining a weirdly appealing and faltering momentum despite himself.

The following “Two” roughly adheres to the same formula, but initially features a fairly coherent groove. In fact, it almost sounds like the band attempted to play an actual song, but were instantly derailed by their inability to control their chain of effects pedals. Even that semblance of order soon disappears, however, and the rest of the piece is a push-pull between shambling, overloaded meandering and rare, ephemeral convergences into actual chords and hints of melody. 

Near the end, the more structured elements seem to finally win and something songlike briefly emerges before falling apart again. In classic Dead C fashion, even the most coherent parts still features mumbled, unintelligible vocals and a guitarist who sounds like he does not realize the song started and is still unhurriedly trying to tune. 

Unsurprisingly, the remaining three songs essentially offer up more of the same, albeit with somewhat shorter durations. While The Dead C do not have any tricks up their collective sleeve, they compensate with their admirably thorough commitment to this aesthetic of snarling and wrongheaded feedback sludge. If the band does have a trick, it is only that they create such an effective illusion of lumbering sloppiness at times that I am still caught off-guard whenever a piece like “Three” suddenly blossoms into a striking passage of strangled notes or hauntingly swooping feedback howls.

If possible, I suspect Trouble might be the most ingeniously incompetent-sounding Dead C album yet, as it is very easy to imagine a guitarist with no fingers or a kid who just bought a drum set being able to happily jam along with it. That is not dissimilar to how some people view free-jazz, yet the gulf between titans like Ornette Coleman and Pharaoh Sanders and mere dabblers and dilettantes is enormous. With Trouble, it would not be crazy to say The Dead C have become the Ornette Coleman of noisy rock deconstruction, as this is arguably their artistic zenith. 

Previous classics like Harsh 70s Reality certainly have better (or at least more accessible) songs, but Trouble willfully throws away absolutely everything that makes rock music great and still sounds amazingly vibrant, dynamic, unpredictable, and complex. It is easy to see why The Dead C is so underappreciated, as this is a singularly messy and uncompromising vision, but I cannot think of any other bands that could produce a satisfying double album without the benefit of hooks, melodies, or strong rhythms. The Dead C admittedly offer some raw power at times, but Trouble would quickly become a numbing experience if that was all they had to offer. What they bring to the table instead is considerably more unique and intangible: an intuitive hive-mind genius for both artfully falling apart and unexpectedly shaping ruin into beauty.

Listen here.

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The Dead C, “Eusa Kills” (Flying Nun, 1989)

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This 1989 album is most notable for being generally regarded as The Dead C’s “pop” album. Also, a lot of people seem to rank it quite highly within the band’s discography. I find both of those designations somewhat puzzling, however, as the only real concessions to conventional rock music are the stellar opener and a cacophonous, shambolic T. Rex cover. Other than that, Eusa Kills is just a lot of messy, half-baked, and contrarian business-as-usual for The Dead C. The band admittedly keeps most of the songs to pop song durations, but that is less of a structural and songcraft achievement than a decision to just fade out earlier than usual. While Eusa Kills has its moments, it is far from The Dead C’s prime.

Notably, the lead-off song “Scary Nest” tends to get a lot of comparisons to early Sonic Youth, which seems a bit undeserved and off-the-mark for two reasons: 1.) early Sonic Youth were always much more arty and adventurous guitar-wise than anything in “Nest,” and 2.) The Dead C are (and have always been) anything but derivative. Maybe it sounds even less like a Dead C song than it does a Sonic Youth song though, as it is certainly uncharacteristically propulsive, urgent, and catchy: the drums play a consistent double-time beat, the guitars strum an actual satisfying chord progression, and there is even a hooky vocal melody.  

In fact, “Scary Nest” could probably recall a vast array of other bands (good ones, even!), but the Sonic Youth tag has stuck primarily because of the lo-fi recording and the sputtering, chirping squalls of lead guitar. There is nothing consciously arty about the noisy guitars though, as they share much more in common with a wild Neil Young performance than anything derived from Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham. 

That “feral” aspect is what makes all the difference for me (it helps that it is enhanced by plenty of wordless vocal howls as well). The Dead C were not trying to redefine guitar music or ape what was happening in NYC—they were just playing with the perfect balance of controlled songcraft and reckless abandon. As a result, “Scary Nest” is a great song unlike anything else in The Dead C discography,

Of course, once The Dead C had proven that they could write a killer song that people might like, they immediately set out to prove that they can also write very messy, chaotic songs that are nearly impossible to like by design. Eusa Kills is full of such pieces. Sometimes they take the shape of a piece like “Glass Hole Pit,” which sounds great and promising, then abruptly ends after a minute. 

Other times, the band just noodles and mumbles for several minutes (“Bumtoe”) or unleashes a torrent of hookless guitar spew over a tom-heavy beat for 45 seconds, then stops (“Call Off Your Dogs”). Even the better, more fully formed pieces like “Phantom Power” dilute their better ideas with a lot of riffless, hookless, and melody-less guitar noise. Admittedly, I do love guitar noise and there are some cool moments strewn throughout Eusa, but the noise rarely seems to be in service of anything greater—it is mostly just something indulgent to tolerate until something interesting happens.

Thankfully, there are a few other enjoyable pieces of varying quality besides “Scary Nest.” The best one is “Now I Fall,” which buries an actual coherent song beneath some wonderfully warped, too-loud guitar. The closing “Envelopment” is also quite good, combining a lazy, overdriven bass melody and ripples of clean guitar to pleasantly warm, sleepy, and druggy effect. 

A couple of other pieces have their champions as well, but I do not know quite what to make of them. The more perplexing of the two is a cover of T. Rex’s swaggering, anthemic “Children of the Revolution,” which is reduced to a dissonant, smoldering, and distinctly non-anthemic wreckage. I cannot figure out the motive at all: mockery, homage…neither? I truly have no idea. In any case, it is an enjoyable (if puzzling) detournement. 

Later, there is a 7-minute piece entitled “Maggot” which presages some of The Dead C’s superior longform work to come. Unfortunately, it is mostly just notable as a proto-version of better songs like “Love” and “Outside.” I certainly like the snare-roll drums and the miasma of deranged and strangled noises, but it never quite catches fire and features a fairly annoying cackling refrain. So close to greatness, but just off the mark. Alas.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it is safe to say that Eusa Kills is merely an intermittently promising album by a band that would eventually get much better, but I do wonder what I would have thought of this album if I had heard it in its original time and context. It is hard to imagine a more clear and defiant “fuck you” to the overproduced and image-driven world of ’80s pop music than this, so it definitely deserves a place of honor for its sheer wrongness: this is definitely an archetypal “against the grain” album. 

However, it is also just the start of something better rather than a golden age unto itself—willful ugliness and a hilariously bad attitude are great, but it took the band a few more years to perfect the balance between negation, deconstruction, art, and accessibility. Though Eusa Kills is probably still canonical among Dead C albums, its unevenness and exasperating proportion of filler prevent it from truly ranking among their best work.

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The Dead C, “The White House” (Siltbreeze, 1995)

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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.

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The Dead C, “Armed Courage” (Ba Da Bing, 2013)

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There is something endearingly heroic about The Dead C, as they have been gleefully blurring the lines between inspired deconstructionist rock and messy, half-assed indulgence to widespread indifference for almost three decades. Unsurprisingly, this latest release finds them obstinately splashing about in the same ambiguously muddied waters as ever. I suspect these two fairly challenging long-form pieces are unlikely to win the trio any new fans, but they are absolutely certain to please the already indoctrinated, as they rank among the group’s finest.

In their early days, Wire famously had a list of rules that defined their aesthetic, dictating that they always “stick to the point” and avoid such perils as rocking out, embracing Americanisms, or needlessly embellishing their songs in any way. At this point in their career, I suspect The Dead C probably have an even more restrictive set of guidelines that likely includes such dictates as “no melodies, no structure, no consistent rhythm” and “never, ever seem like you are trying.” 

While I am being (somewhat) facetious, it is very hard to hear a song like “Armed” and not think that its genesis was anything other than “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a new song: I’m going to stomp my distortion pedal and play a chord. Then I am going to keep flogging that same goddamn chord relentlessly for the next 20 minutes with no apparent variation. You guys in?”

While I do not think I am being too unfairly reductionist in that description, “Armed” still somehow works beautifully and avoids sounding like any of the “amplifier worship” bands (Sunn O))), etc.) that tread similar-sounding territory. The secret seems to lie both in the details and in avoiding the expected trajectory, as guitarists Bruce Russell and Michael Morley imbue that droning chord with a great deal of simmering tension through layers of snarling wah-wah and distorted sizzle. Drummer Robbie Yeats, for his part, alternates between clattering fills, silence, and an array of tumbling, lurching, and off-kilter martial-sounding beats. The whole effect is quite impressive, resembling a constantly shifting smoldering wreckage of a song that never turns into anything more, yet never gets tiresome.

The second-half of the album, “Courage,” arguably captures the band in “song” mode, as Morley initially mumbles and moans some half-asleep-sounding vocals over an electronic buzz, some tinkling piano, something resembling a beat, and some understated guitar abuse. Gradually, however, Yeats’ drumming gets more propulsive and the guitars get a bit harsher and the piece begins to resemble a perverse parody/homage of a motorik beat, albeit one with a drummer who has no intention of sticking to the script at all. Then, around the half-way mark, all forward momentum halts and the piece gradually transforms into a fading, understated outro of slow-burning guitar noise that again resembles the gutted, ruined corpse of a rock song.

As far as Dead C albums go, Armed Courage is deceptively great: it initially seemed like two shambling, off-the-cuff jams to me, but the pieces all gradually fell into place after a few listens. As inscrutable as these guys are, they definitely seem to be intuitively and inventively improvising against one another in a way that steers guitar noise into a realm that it is uniquely their own. 

Notably, this is the first Dead C album where I have begun to appreciate the mad genius of Robbie Yeats’ drumming, as his unpredictable transformations and derailments of even the simplest of beats keep these two songs sounding like they could go barreling out of control at any moment. That omnipresent sense of danger makes everything Morley and Russell play sound precarious and somewhat tense, which is no simple feat. In anyone else’s hands, an album like this would be crushingly boring: no melodic movement, no cathartic explosions—just 40 minutes of endlessly simmering guitar noise with seemingly random drums and no pay-off. In The Dead C’s hands, however, it is a refreshing and invigorating triumph of bloody-minded wrongness.

Listen here.

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“Dead C vs. Rangda” (Ba Da Bing, 2013)

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This unusual split is basically just an excuse to release a handful of lost songs from around the time of Dead C’s Eusa Kills album (1989), but that is just fine by me (particularly since I like Rangda too). It is an inspired pairing for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that the two bands could not possibly sound more wildly different: the Rangda half sounds like a trio of skilled musicians intuitively improvising together, while the Dead C half is an endearingly shambling mess. Despite that yawning stylistic chasm (and a two decade span between the sessions), both bands offer at least one song that beautifully highlights what they do best.

The whole idea of “lost” Dead C songs is very amusing to me, as this split makes it very clear that the line between an actual Dead C song and a recording of them aimlessly messing around in rehearsal is probably a very blurry one indeed. That is not to say that these four songs are not likable, but things like hooks, structure, melody, fidelity, and tightness have never been the trio’s greatest talents. Rather, they seem to have been put on earth solely to sound gloriously wrong at all times and to seem extremely cool while doing it. 

Both “Eusa Kills” and “Tomorrow” are ideal testaments to that unique brand of genius, as the former is basically an avalanche of over-the-top distortion and half-mumbled vocals propelled by a skeletal drum machine beat, while the latter unleashed some impressively ugly and anti-virtuosic guitar squall over a jazzy shuffle. The remaining two pieces, however, fall a bit short, amounting to little more than prickly lo-fi ambiance and something that sounds like a decontextualized live guitar solo shorn of the surrounding song.

For their side, Rangda offer up just two pieces: the lengthy “Gracilaria” and the shorter “Sancticallist,” one of which highlights everything wrong with the trio and one which highlights everything right. Sadly, the longer one is the misfire, as Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny do a whole lot of sleepy noodling before eventually erupting into a woefully unearned crescendo. Chris Corsano gamely tries to inject some excitement into the proceedings by bringing his usual intensity, but he has virtually nothing to work with—it just sounds like two boring guitar solos over the top of a good drum solo rather than anything coherent.

Curiously, “Sancticallist” is not overtly all that different, but everything somehow locks together beautifully into a condensed, simmering, and oft-explosive whole. It is remarkable just how dramatic the difference between improvisations can be with no clear reason, as the magic is either there or it is not, regardless of the strength of the underlying motifs: “Sancticallist” is simply great, while “Gracilaria” is clearly not.

Naturally, there is no getting around the fact that this is a very minor release within both bands’ discographies, but that does not diminish it at all, as it does not pretend to be anything more. Essentially, Ba Da Bing located a handful of Dead C songs that no one has heard, then decided to make them available in a stylish and inspired way (a limited vinyl-only release with striking cover art and a similarly cool band on the flipside). As such, this is kind of a perfect release: casual fans can safely pass it by knowing that there is nothing truly essential or revelatory to be found, while more devout fans will undoubtedly be very pleased with both the music and the physical object.

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The Dead C, “Harsh 70’s Reality” (Siltbreeze, 1992)

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This 1992 double LP has historically been regarded to be The Dead C’s zenith, though contention for that particular honor has gotten quite a bit more crowded with some of their more recent efforts. In any case, there are certainly a few excellent songs and flashes of outsider brilliance amidst all the stumbling, shambling chaos and gleefully deliberate self-sabotage. The flaws are a large part of the charm though: lots of people write good songs, but no one else has maintained this degree of playful, yet unwavering insouciance for quite as long as this New Zealand trio has (nor would they presumably want to). That inexplicable persistence is its own artistic triumph though and this album is the most towering monument to it.

In classic self-defeating Dead C fashion, Harsh 70’s Reality opens with over 20 minutes of abstract guitar noise in “Driver UFO.” Not a firestorm of dynamic Sonic Youth-style squall, mind you; just a buzzing, sizzling, and roiling ocean of feedback punctuated with occasional stabs of clanging strums or a rare deliberately played note. Gradually it gives way to some indifferently played one-finger Farfisa drones that seem to randomly stop at times, before giving way yet again to a non-crescendo of still more strangled feedback. Admittedly, some of the guitar noises are sporadically very cool (especially when they sound like a large dying animal), but “Driver UFO” is most successful as both a provocation and a statement of intent: it filled the entire A side of the initial vinyl release, forcing hapless first-time listeners to listen to the entire interminable thing in doomed expectation that it would eventually cohere into something more, which it never does.

Of course, the genius of The Dead C lies in their ambiguity and unpredictability, as the line separating “brilliant rock deconstruction” and “improvised, tossed-off mess” is particularly blurry with them. While a lot of their work is admittedly lo-fi, half-assed chaos, they do occasionally get things gloriously right. The first hint that there might be something more to this album comes with the surprisingly propulsive second song “Sky,” which is basically sludgy two-chord punk rock enhanced by moaning and squawking feedback and drumming that sounds like it is constantly on the verge of losing the beat or accidentally changing the time signature (which is presumably intentional, as Robbie Yeats has spent time in, uh, more traditionally competent bands like The Verlaines). Also, the lyrics, when decipherable, are simultaneously cryptic, defiant, and vaguely menacing (at least from their tone).

“Sky” is followed by the epic “Love,” which is one of the best Dead C songs ever and the primary reason why this album is worth owning. It is built upon a lazily strummed, brooding, and murky two-chord progression, which would normally be quite a bit of structure for a Dead C song, but it is initially undercut by a noisy, wandering guitar solo, odd stops and starts, and unnervingly arbitrary snare hits. After about three minutes, however, Michael Morley (I think) steps up to the mic and starts creepily repeating variations of the phrase “and you talk about the rules” with unexpected intensity. From then on, “Love” is basically 9 minutes of slow-burning, ebbing-and-flowing bad-ass noise rock perfection, as either Morley or Bruce Russell unleashes a prolonged meandering guitar solo that resembles nothing less than a demon-possessed Neil Young on quaaludes…which is exactly the sort of amazing experience that I can only get from The Dead C.

The other major song on the album is the similarly lengthy closer “Hope,” which is equal parts great and maddeningly exasperating. Built upon just one insistently played dissonant chord, mumbled vocals, and an accompaniment of cool echoey guitar noises, it sounds like one of the best songs that Jandek never wrote…for a while, anyway. Then around the halfway point, it explodes into an awkward crescendo and also sounds like it is suddenly being recorded live in a loud club, which is disorienting to say the least. Then it ends, then comes back…without any crowd noise at all. I think the crowd noise might actually be a tape, as it sounds just as loud as the music and it also seems like quite a lot of happy people chatting, which seems like a very implausible thing to be happening during an incredibly bleak song by an incredibly obscure band (at the time, anyway).

The rest of the album is the proverbial “mixed bag,” as there is quite a bit of lo-fi, treble-heavy messiness strewn about. I like the brief “Suffer Bomb Damage” a lot though, which combines a forlorn Farfisa non-melody with the jagged, murky scrape of a single insistently strummed chord. The smoldering “Baseheart” is another strong moment, as feedback and gnarled guitar slashes buffet a sludgy bass throb and unexpectedly decipherable and consistent vocals. The lesser songs are not exactly filler though, as they all nicely augment the mood of dark, anything-can-happen nihilism that pervades the album.

The version of Harsh 70’s Reality that I have is the 1998 reissue, which omits two songs from the original LPs: “Shark” and “T. is Never Over I & II.” Both were restored, however, for Siltbreeze’s “remastered” 2012 reissue (I cannot detect any improvement in the band’s willfully messy sound, nor would I necessarily want it to be improved in the first place). “T. is Never Over” is a fairly inessential bit of smoldering guitar wreckage that later turned up on the Vain, Erudite, and Stupid compilation. “Shark” is quite a compellingly ridiculous piece though, combining sloppy guitar noodling with a pitch-shifted voice recording and spirited “polka beat” drumming that sounds perpetually on the verge of careening out of control (a recurring Dead C highlight, I suppose).

Notably, I have seen Harsh 70’s Reality periodically hailed as both a masterpiece and one of the single best albums of the ’90s, claims that seem absolutely insane if I base my judgment solely on the quality of the songs. I suppose it is kind of a masterpiece in some less tangible sense, however, as it is an absolute monolith of sprawling, willful wrongness that practically dares people to try and like it. Though that attitude certainly appeals to me, I suspect that folks who are less amused by brazen contrarianism than I am will find little to warm to here aside from the absolutely stellar “Love.” There are certainly more song-based, accessible Dead C albums out there to be enjoyed for those who want them, but this is the ideal destination for those looking for something a bit different: a prolonged wallow in the messy, smoldering ruins of rock music.

Listen here.