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The Dead C, "Patience"
If you hang around enough basement shows, if you listen to enough record collector shop talk, if you read lists of your favorite obscure musicians listing their favorite obscure musicians, then you just may have heard of the Dead C. Two decades into the game, the band has not swerved from their distinctive brand of tangled, noisy improvisational rock. To that end, Patience delivers no surprises, no attention-grabbing gestures towards a wider audience, just a steady devotion to raw, monolithic sound.
The Dead C have, at least to my knowledge, never been about quick thrills.In that regard, any of their albums could be titled Patience for the heavy, slow motion dynamics the band specializes in. Two lengthy tracks, each about a quarter hour long, comprise the bulk of the record, with two short tracks in between. The opener, "Empire," is built around conventional, doom-metal style groove provided by drummer Robbie Yeats.Squalls of feedback rise and fall, howling over the beat, the variety of pitches tones resembling synthesizers as much as guitars and amps.
It’s not until the last half of Patience that the band flirts with the coarse formlessness for which they are infamous. "South" begins sparsely, with slow, muffled guitar strumming buried in high pitched amplifier hum. Shards of loopy feedback crop up, followed by metallic, detuned guitar riffing. Just as the song is about crest in a spasming crescendo, Yeats joins in with a standard, punk-rock beat, except that his kit sounds stifled and distant, unable to overcome the noise around it.
It may be asked why a band like the Dead C would continue plugging away in near obscurity for decades.Peer respect and cultish fans help, but these things alone aren’t enough sustain a band, and we may as well just forget about album sales entirely. The only cogent answer seems to be that the band has little ambition but to make the kind of music that appeals to the mainstream. Throughout all the changes in taste that have come in the last two decades, their dedication to improvised rock remains almost singular. Patience indeed.
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