Dead Meadow
10 out of 10 - Flawless.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Great American Music Hall - San Francisco
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I once had a roommate that would lock himself in his room and play Neorosis records in constant loop and high volume. We lived in a warehouse in the industrial district--but had we any neighbors they surely would have thought the world was ending (Not unlike the time, my senior year in high school when I managed to get a Locust CD stuck inside the drive of one of the computers in the newspaper lab. The teacher not only called the IT guy but a priest as well. She refused to believe that music could actually sound like that). From this roommate I learned to appreciate a little thing called Melodic Metal. Thanks to bands such as Neorosis and Isis that make music as fluid as it is dense, 'jam' is no longer a dirty word. They.ve taught me that I don.t hate guitar solos, I just hate hippies.
So where were all the San Francisco Scenesters last Saturday night? At the Great American Music Hall grooving to the invasive rhythms of Dead Meadow. Yes, I did say 'grooving' and this small crowd was almost entirely of the in-the-know, I have better records than you and I'm in between tours now rocker variety. (This is if you discount the legions of teeny-bopper Sabbath enthusiasts that lined up early). Between the moody, saturated lights, green fog pumping into the air and the pristine white drum kit with make-shift liquid projections twirling around--one wasn.t sure whether to look for leather-clad sluts chained to cage fences or white rabbits with apple-bongs. Call it Metaldelia if you.d like--or better still, don.t call it anything. Just let these deeply intrusive sounds jiggle your guts with all the pleasure of sitting on a washing machine or banging your head against a brick wall (burns 200 calories an hour).
Conjuring Nirvana, Sabbath and garage psychedelia in the same long and rasping breath, these skinny kids look like they just hopped off the Omaha bandwagon but play like they could challenge Ozzy himself to a bat-eating contest. Even the vocals might have you believe for a fleeting second that there is some deeply-embedded Saddle-Creek worship going on here, but the guitar riffage swiftly sends that idea right back to Nebraska. Yes, I said 'riffage' and for those of us who would sooner sniff arsenic than patchouli--relax. Though the vernacular may be similar this is NOT a hippie band. This is the kind of noise that makes you feel like you.ve been hugging the subs, like you probably wouldn.t notice a small earthquake. These songs don.t just catch you, they drag you with them to a dimly lit place where angst and bliss intersect and you wanna yell out "fuck yeah" if only the bass hadn.t already sucked the life out of you. There was even a moment when I was like, "Holy Shit! These dudes are using WAA WAA bars!" before I remembered that they have peddles for those kinds of things these days.
Dead Meadow will take you to the brink of something huge before backing off--leading this writer to believe that these tantric metalheads are practicing some magical sort of Wayne's World Zen.
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