Los Angeles rockers Deathchant release their second album, Waste, today on RidingEasy Records. As a follow-up to their 2019 self-titled debut, which came out through King Volume Records and Kozmik Artifactz — kudos to the band on their associations to-date; these are good backings to have — it is a seven-track outing full of arguments in its own favor. Be it the dirtied up proto-thrash of “Holy Roller” or the manner in which opener “Rails” — let’s assume they’re big fans of locomotive infrastructure — evolves from and devolves to psychedelic noise, galloping and bouncing in between like it ain’t no thing because in the end the universe gonna eat us all up anyhow, so here’s a hook while we can, the four-piece led by guitarist/vocalist T.J. Lemieux (who’s also worked with the revitalized Psychedelic Speed Freaks) bring cassette worthy skate-vibes to “Black Dirt” without saying a word about it, and after unleashing their inner Buzzo later in “Holy Roller,” they make a centerpiece of “Gallows,” with John Belino joining Lemieux in winding lead work — count bassist George Camacho in as well, at least at the start — while Colin Fahrner brings the propulsion on drums. Shove, shove, shove. Move forward. There’s no time to… what’s the word again?

“Waste” — which follows “Gallows” in leading off side B — answers back to “Holy Roller” in its metallic bite and mastery of urgency-born-of-stretched-noise duality, and “Plague” is a Lizzyian victory lap of harmonized lead guitar set to a backdrop of modern West Coast stonerism, echoed shouts calling to mind Saviours, Red Fang and any number of others who, if you invited them to your house, would probably wreck up the place, apologize for doing so, and then keep doing it. Like “Rails” before it, “Waste” also gives itself over to noise, this time harsher feedback from which “Plague” bursts, and its own crashout comes with a shorter stretch of noise in front of closer “Maker.”

I don’t know if those elements are what Lemieux is talking about in emphasizing the band’s reliance on improv — there’s no shortage of live feel throughout, and if some of these solos and stuff like that were off the cuff, that’s easy enough to believe — but Deathchant largely hold to the basic tenets of verse/chorus across Waste, and even in the instrumental finale, there’s a sense of plot to the procession of movements. Whether that’s made up at the time it was recorded or not, it exists, and it’s to the band’s credit that one way or the other their material comes with a sense of the spontaneous along with perhaps more considered elements, even if that consideration came in overdubs afterward.

That’s a question of process, and while we’re giving credit to Deathchant on presentation, it’s worth including that the actual listening process of Waste invites precious little consideration of how it’s made beyond any dude-how’d-they-get-that-tone musings. This is heavy rock and roll, classic edged and coated in grit, no pretense, touching on metal but not hewn to aggro tenets. Not so much playing to style as stylistically playing. Fucking cool, man. If Deathchant were on the fest, you’d want to show up. They’ve got a killer half-hour set right here, and they only sound willing to bash you over the head with it if called upon to do so.

Right on.

“Black Dirt” video premieres below.

Deathchant, “Black Dirt” official video premiere

Waste will be available on LP, CD and download on June 25th, 2021 via RidingEasy Records.

Though you wouldn’t be able to tell by the concise structures and well-crafted songs, a lot of Deathchant’s music is improvised, both in the studio and live. That’s not to suggest their songs are jammy — they’re very tightly organized compositions. But the four musicians have that special musical telepathy that allows them to keep the song structures open-ended.

“Improv is a huge thing for us and always has been,” singer/guitarist T.J. Lemieux says. “The musical freedom to look at the other dudes in the band and be able to take things wherever we want to go is magical. I like the feel of flying off the hinges.”

Likewise, the band itself is similarly amorphous in its membership. “We run the band with an open door. No lineup is definitive,” Lemieux explains. On Waste, the lineup is: Lemieux, George Camacho on bass, Colin Fahrner on drums, and John Belino on second guitar.

Waste was recorded live in a rented cabin in the mountains of Big Bear, CA. “We packed a big-ass van and set up in the living room and kitchen,” Lemieux says. “Tracked it live, with overdubs after.” The whole album was recorded over two separate weekends, engineered by Steve Schroeder, who also recorded the band’s 2019 self-titled debut album.

Artist: Deathchant
Album: Waste
Label: RidingEasy Records
Release Date: June 25, 2021
01. Rails
02. Black Dirt
03. Holy Roller
04. Gallows
05. Waste
06. Plague
07. Maker

Deathchant on Bandcamp

Deathchant on Instagram

RidingEasy Records website

Think maybe we’ll get some new Year of the Cobra soon? That’d be cool. Their last record, 2019’s Ash and Dust (review here), was their best yet, and they went on tour in Europe to support its release through Prophecy Productions. The Seattle duo are no strangers to road work, but even if their thinking in that regard hasn’t changed, the world in which they’re operating has. Still, it’s more than welcome to see them getting once more into the fray even if I won’t actually get to see them perform. Hey, maybe you will. Or a couple other lucky Sacramento types. Who knows?

They’re calling it a mini-tour, which by their standard is fair enough, but one way or the other it’s select dates along the West Coast — a Seattle show at El Corazon tucked in amid a couple travel weekends — and maybe that’s an initial putting-out of feelers to see what the situation is in venues, with humans, and so on. Again, legit. One imagines that the last year-plus has left Year of the Cobra particularly antsy to play, since it’s kind of second nature to them — or was, anyhow. Whatever. Get your vaccine and go see bands and buy shirts and records and all that stuff. I hope these gigs go well and Year of the Cobra do more soon. If they wanna add a Parsippany, New Jersey, date anytime, I’ll book the Mt. Tabor Firehouse and invite a couple friends (note: I don’t really have friends). We can get Tabor Pizza and beers from Hoover’s.

Until then:

We’ve all weathered the storm, now let’s party extra hard! We’ve missed you, come out to a show and say hi! More shows to announce soon!

8/13 – Bremerton, WA. – The Manette Saloon
8/20 – Nevada City, CA. – The Brick
8/21 – San Francisco, CA. Bottom of the Hill
8/22 – Sacramento, CA. – Holy Diver
8/27 – Seattle, WA. – El Corazon
9/10 – Bellingham, WA. – The Shakedown
9/11 – Portland, OR. – The High Water Mark

https://www.facebook.com/yearofthecobraband/
https://yearofthecobra.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/prophecyproductions/
https://prophecy-de.bandcamp.com/
https://en.prophecy.de/

Year of the Cobra, Ash and Dust (2019)

I’ve done a couple whole-show-playing-one-band-type episodes of The Obelisk Show on Gimme Metal before, but to my recollection this is the first time I’ll have dedicated two episodes to one band. Can you argue? Starting with Pain of Mind in 1985, the career and legacy of Neurosis is simply unparalleled, and to even get to listen to two hours of their material in a row, let alone talk about it on a silly radio show, is a personal treat, let alone of any critical importance or something any other human beings might dig.

We go from Pain of Mind through The Word as Law — quickly, admittedly, since those songs are short — and slam headfirst into Souls at Zero as the band’s style progressed into tribalist heavy and what was considered avant garde at the time and became the foundations on which post-metal was laid. Enemy of the Sun, Through Silver in Blood, Times of Grace, Sovereign, and finally A Sun That Never Sets is a lot of ground to cover, but consider how much is left. This doesn’t even include solo stuff or side-projects or the version of Times of Grace with the Tribes of Neurot release Grace synched up to it or any of that other awesome whatnot. Still, one does the best one can to get in as much as one can. Sometimes two hours just isn’t enough. So we’ll do four between this ep and the next one in two weeks.

Thanks for listening and/or reading. I hope you enjoy.

The Obelisk Show airs 5PM Eastern today on the Gimme app or at: http://gimmemetal.com

Full playlist:

The Obelisk Show – 06.25.21

The Obelisk Show on Gimme Metal airs every Friday 5PM Eastern, with replays Sunday at 7PM Eastern. Next new episode is July 9 (subject to change). Thanks for listening if you do.

Gimme Metal website

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Brazilian duo Projeto Trator‘s Fall 2019 European tour took them to Belgium, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. Not necessarily in that order, but not necessarily not; they covered a lot of ground. On July 2, they’ll release Live in Leipzig through Crocodilo Discos, capturing their Sept. 18 show at Kopfsalat Gästeservice. In the company of the genre-blending Umbilichaos, guitarist/vocalist Paulo Ueno and drummer Thiago Padilha made their way through famed venues and festivals like Drugstore in Berlin, Psych Umami in the Czech Republic, and Sommafest in Rietschen, Germany, among others. It looked like a good run when it was announced, and there were still a bunch more dates they were hoping to fill in.

The Leipzig show was one of those, and somehow, listening to Live in Leipzig‘s 13-song/51-minute stretch, that seems fitting. Projeto Trator are not by any means a new band. They have three studio full-lengths under their belt — the latest of them, Humanofobia, came out in 2016 — and a slew of splits and EPs and other live records, so there’s plenty of documentation of their work going back to 2007, but Live in Leipzig presents a particularly chaotic vision of who they are as a unit, whether that’s the space rocking noisefest of “Tambores de Sangue” or the slower swirl of “Vermes,” feedback and effects and a cosmic lurch echo that would bring a smile to the face of Sons of Otis themselves all coming together in how-resilient-is-your-P.A. fashion, extreme in its way but still listenable if you’re willing to give yourself over to it.

Their set starts with a jam and ends with a jam, and in between, tempests like “Você Não é o Seu Emprego” and “Absurdos” bring High on Fire-style sub-two-minute raging to the berth of longer, wider avalanches in “No Orbita do Medo” and post-jam opener “A Foice” — they close with “A Valsa” ahead of that last jam, and though the translations “a sickle” and “a waltz” are a fun pairing, it wouldn’t seem symmetry between them was the point — and along the way, “Rua dal 7 Facadas” and the where-did-they-find-even-more-distortion-from “Rato Morto” cast an identity of brutal and exploratory psychedelic muck, willing to pummel as well as groove, and unwilling to compromise its purpose to be gentler on the ear. It’s easy to imagine that, if you were at Kopfsalat Gästeservice that night, you might’ve felt the volume in your chest had you been standing in front of the stage. The arguments for doing so are manifold here.

Projeto Trator released their latest studio EP, Corifeu, in March 2020, and if the punker underpinnings weren’t clear on Live in Leipzig — they were — then certainly the four-songer should help get the point across. I’ve included that stream from the band’s Bandcamp near the bottom of the post, as well as a video from the Leipzig show, in case you should find yourself wondering how two humans could conjure such a wash of noise.

Only one way to find out.

Enjoy:

Projeto Trator, Live in Leipzig official premiere

“Live in Leipzig” is the new audio live record coming from the Brazilian heavy sludge duo Projeto Trator. The recording was made in 2019 in their European tour at Kopfsalat Gästeservice in Leipzig, Germany where the band performed 15 shows in 6 countries. The band show us all our powerful psychedelic sludge wall in 13 noisy tracks from different releases of the band.

The material will be released officially in July, 2

SETLIST:
1 – Opening Jam
2 – A Foice
3 – Tambores de Sangue
4 – Na Rua das 7 Facadas
5 – Vermes
6 – Na Órbita do Medo
7 – Não Me Provoque
8 – Você Não é o Seu Emprego
9 – Rato Morto
10 – Delírios do Dr. Lilly
11 – Absurdos
12 – A Valsa
13 – Finishing Jam

Credits:
Recorded by: Murai
Mixing/Mastering by: Paulo Ueno
Cover art by: Jonathan “Jow” Rissi

PROJETO TRATOR is:
Paulo Ueno – guitar and vox
Thiago Padilha – drums

Projeto Trator, Corifeu (2020)

Projeto Trator, “A Foice” Live in Leipzig, Germany, Sept. 18, 2019

Projeto Trator website

Projeto Trator on Facebook

Projeto Trator on Instagram

Projeto Trator on Bandcamp

Crocodilo Discos on Facebook

Crocodilo Discos on Instagram

Crocodilo Discos on Bandcamp

Stay with me here, because this is a lot of info. First, South African heavy rockers Ruff Majik — whose own Johni Holiday has taken it upon himself to curate a series of recommendations of bands from his home country in The Obelisk Collective; thanks much to him for that — have a new video up for “Swine Tooth Grin.” Track comes from their Fall 2020 full-length, The Devil’s Cattle (review here), which is a thing you should hear if you haven’t. Album stream and new video both included at the bottom of this post. The other three videos the band has done for the record and a recent interview with Holiday are here.

Second, they’re kicking off a new series of singles and comics called Pulp. This is ultimately leading to a next long-player/graphic novel/video series in 2022, but the comics are set to come out monthly along the way (which seems ambitious), and they’re going to be doing a Kickstarter for the whole thing because, well, yeah, I should hope so.

Third, there’s another video coming out on July 30 for “Heart Like an Alligator.” That’s easy, right? Seems they’re wasting no time.

Holiday was pretty tight-lipped on upcoming projects when we did that interview, and I guess now we know why. Patience is a virtue. I look forward to seeing the comic and being a little disappointed when I don’t get to be in it.

The PR wire has all the relevant details. Here’s to the heavy lifting:

Ruff Majik and announce PULP, their new single and comic series of releases

There is no white magic, there is no black magic, there is only Ruff Majik. Pulp Rock fandom, here we come.

Ruff Majik has never been a band to do the same thing twice. From trying out different production styles for every release, playing mixtures of genres ranging from soul to black metal, to releasing a season-based EP series (later compiled into a full album), the band has always strived to keep themselves (and their fans) on their toes.

It should come as no surprise then that Johni Holiday has dreamt up yet another mad hatter type plan for their upcoming release.

After the release of The Devil’s Cattle in October 2020, the band found themselves at a crossroads. Ruff Majik had just increased their membership to a five piece, the album was well received critically, and sold well in terms of vinyl, but didn’t reach the lofty heights the band were aspiring to. As fate would have it, the band pressed for their first breakout release just as COVID-19 hit the world.

Says Johni: “It’s a bummer you know. We had just singed to Mongrel Records and had this festival ready album, with the best production value we’ve ever attempted, big eye-catching music videos, everything. And then the world stopped. I guess you could argue that we had a captive audience, hahaha, but I don’t think that’s completely true. The world was so oversaturated with online activity that everything just became engulfed. Too much news to follow, too many amazing artists releasing amazing productions due to their newly found time off. Just too much of everything. Being able to tour would have made a world of difference.”

The band needed to make a plan to ensure their future endeavours would generate some heat. So, what then? What is the logical step forward for a small South African band, still hell bent on world domination, but humbled by a global pandemic? Enter PULP – Ruff Majik’s rebirth, re-brand, and singles campaign. Based on the idea of early 1900’s pulp fiction magazines, which are described as:

“A genre of racy, action-based stories published in cheaply printed magazines from around 1900 to the 1950s. It got its name from the paper it was printed on. Magazines featuring such stories were typically published using cheap, ragged-edged paper made from wood pulp. These magazines were sometimes called pulps.”

Says Johni: “So then the idea hit me. I’m a consumer of all things crazy, b-grade and wonderful. Our band name even came from a failed pilot for a b-grade adaption of an H.P. Lovecraft story (Rough Magik). One thing I’ve always been very invested in was the history of pulp fiction, not the Tarantino film, but where it actually got its name from. Just these crazy stories that were printed in mass on terrible, low grade paper, that gave rise to many different genres of fiction, and were even the ancestors of comic books. I always kind of felt like that was what Ruff Majik was doing with our music, we were always playing ‘pulp rock’. It just didn’t come out regularly enough and lacked the storytelling capacity that a short novel would. So, then I thought, why not have comics? Why not have animated features to go along with the singles and give us a sense of the world around the music? Why not turn us into an animated band, like Dethklok or Gorillaz?”

Therefore, Johni set forth to create a universe of pulp literature, to go along with their music, old and new.

The new PULP series kicks of today with a web comic telling the story between their videos “Who Keeps Score” and “Swine Tooth Grin”, along with a visualizer video for “Swine Tooth Grin.” The single is the second to last to be released from their album “The Devil’s Cattle”, and features undertones of the blues with battering heavy riffs. It will also be the final single to feature a non-animated video (at least for a while).

Read first issue here: https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/pulp/who-keeps-score/viewer?title_no=657983&episode_no=1

This will be followed up on the 30th of July with another interim comic and an animated music video for their single “Heart Like An Alligator”.

From there, the band plan to start releasing a monthly issue of “PULP”, which will chronicle stories from their past and future discography, released along with a range of animated music videos. The comics will feature the band, including all members and recording members, some other South African musicians, and even musicians in the greater stoner/desert/doom/rock scene.

The newest singles will form part of a full album set for release in 2022 and will be released on a monthly basis along with videos, short online comics and exclusive merch. A release date has been set for June 2022, and announcements thereof and a pre-order are said to follow “soon” (along with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign). What we do know is that the full vinyl/CD release will include multitudes of artwork, as well as a full print version of PULP with all the monthly online comics compiled into one.

If you want to keep up with the PULP chronicles, follow Ruff Majik on Webtoons, Facebook and Instagram, or check out their website for all relevant links. You can also buy merch for the current singles, with artwork centred around new PULP characters, monthly from the band’s Big Cartel storefront.

If you want to contribute to the creation of PULP, you can keep an eye out for their Kickstarter campaign which is launching soon.

If you want to contribute or assist in any other way, you can contact the band at: ruffmajik@gmail.com

The Devils Cattle is out now on Mongrel Records, available on 140g vinyl (single gatefold with splattered coloured vinyl and a pull out A2 poster) and Digipak CD via Just Direct (South Africa) and Black Farm Records (Europe / North America)
Buy // Stream The Devils Cattle: https://orcd.co/thedevilscattle

http://www.ruffmajik.com
http://www.facebook.com/ruffmajik
http://www.instagram.com/ruffmajik
http://mongrelrecords.com
http://www.facebook.com/mongrelrecords
http://www.instagram.com/mongrel_records

Ruff Majik, The Devil’s Cattle (2020)

Ruff Majik, “Swine Tooth Grin” official video

Images of landmarks as dust and rubble amid a pockmarked earth and devastated, re-shaped continents should be familiar enough to anyone who’s spent time amid the History Channel’s sundry apocalypse-porn CGI specials about major impacts, and yeah, there’s definitely a certain catharsis watching a giant asteroid looming above this pale blue dot waiting to unleash firestorms and nuclear winter to speed up the mass extinction that mankind seems so bent on perpetuating. Ka-boom, and all that.

In Cowboys & Aliens‘ new video for “Morbid Orbit,” the story seems to be of the aftermath of same — no breathable air, humanity hunkered down, survival in question. We see a lone figure staggering, people emerging from some kind of bunker to witness the wrecked landscape under a dirty sky. I feel like we’re due a really good end-of-the-world movie. It’s been a while, right? There were a ton for a while there. Everything’s comic books now. Maybe the thing to make is an end-of-the-world comic book.

Either way, amid Cowboys & Aliens — whose most recent full-length was 2019’s Horses of Rebellion (review here) — celebrating 25 years as a band, they’ve released “Morbid Orbit” as part of the Polderrecords compilation, PolderRiffs Vol. II, and they can be seen in the video witnessing the end of definitely-most things with various skyscrapers in the background, among them London’s Strata SE1 with its telltale windmills integrated into the top of its construction.

The message there? Maybe that humanity pretending to give a crap about the environment was too little too late, or moot anyway? Or maybe it’s just a cool looking futuristic building, which, frankly, is legit. Presumably when the tsunamis come, that’ll be the final say on that as well.

The good news, aside from the fact that all that havoc looks awesome in 4K, is the song is also catchy as hell and broadly spacious enough to encompass most of the video’s nine minutes. Cowboys & Aliens lead off PolderRiffs Vol. II and share time there with Wheel of Smoke, Cavaran and others, and they’re well positioned to represent Belgium’s heavy rock underground in both its history and how they’ve grown into their style over the years since they made their full-length debut with 1998’s League of Fools.

Though I suppose the perspective there might be somewhat aligned. It’s still ‘always this and that,’ but sometimes “that” is a big rock taking out the whole planet in one go. These things happen.

So enjoy!

Cowboys & Aliens, “Morbid Orbit” official video premiere

Legendary stoner outfit Cowboys & Aliens from Belgium are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year!

They are currently writing and recording new songs for a new album due early 2022, but for the occasion they have finished one song completely, it’s featured on a vinyl exclusive compilation: POLDERRIFFS that was released on Record Store Day June 12th.

Various Artists, Polderriffs Vol. II (2021)

Cowboys & Aliens on Bandcamp

Cowboys & Aliens on Thee Facebooks

Polderrecords website

Polderrecords on Thee Facebooks

What started out in 2009 as a limited CDR from Bobby Liebling’s Ram Family is now being given the moniker Bobby Liebling & Dave Sherman Basement Chronicles and released under the title Nite Owl on LP and CD through Svart Records. If you recall the Liebling documentary Last Days Here (review here), some of this music was featured. It was pretty raw then and is now as well, but you know, you bring together two of Maryland/D.C. doom’s most celebrated figures in Sherman and Liebling — not to mention Gary Isom and Russ Strahan, who both also add guitar and songwriting — there’s going to be some manner of continued interest.

Liebling earlier this year released the debut from The Limit, also through Svart. He’s about as close to ‘canceled’ as I’ve seen anyone in the doom community come — if the sexual-harassment-on-tour allegations didn’t do it, the assault on his mother seemed to — but remains a figurehead in Chesapeake heavy, and so yeah, putting this stuff out makes sense. Don’t be surprised if Pentagram makes a comeback either. That’s how it goes.

Release here is Oct. 29. Info follows:

Nite Owl by Bobby Liebling and Dave Sherman Basement Chronicles

Preorder LP: https://svartrecords.com/product/bobby-liebling-dave-sherman-nite-owl-album/

Nite Owl by Bobby Liebling and Dave Sherman Basement Chronicles is a set of doom bangers, fuzz rockers and meditative late night boogie finally made available to a wider audience.

In the early years of the new millennium doom metal legend Bobby Liebling was going through a quieter period after the Pentagram lineup that had brought us the album Show ‘Em How had disbanded. Dave Sherman, Liebling’s longtime friend and a renowned doom metal musician (Earthride, Spirit Caravan) started hanging out with Bobby more regularly and eventually the duo decided it’s time to record something and see what it would bring. “After having crashed my car”, Sherman recounts, “I was regularly packing my 4 track into a backpack, saddling up on my iron horse and riding over in the dead of night to visit Bobby. He was in sore spirits and solitary at the time so I’d started going over to keep him company, thumb through his record collection, talk music and party. These hang sessions inspired us both, so I ended up writing some riffs. With the lights of the recorder lit, these night songs effortlessly flowed out of us and were chronicled in one take.”

The Nite Owl album is the first time these recordings, a snippet of which can be heard in the cult classic documentary Last Days Here, are made available officially apart from CD-r “I Plead The Fifth” of which just a handful of copies were made by the artists. The Svart version is also remastered and partially remixed at Noise For Fiction studios, for a slightly more amplified and less lo-fi experience.

Tracklisting:
I’m Takin’ No More (Liebling / Isom)
Drop The Gun (Liebling / Sherman)
You’re Like The Wind (Liebling)
All Lit Up (Liebling / Sherman)
Last Call (Liebling / Sherman)
Space Marshall (Liebling / Sherman)
Sweet Street Cheater (Liebling / Sherman)
Nite Owl (Liebling / Sherman)
South Of The Swamp (Liebling / Strahan)

Lineup:
Russ Strahan – Guitars (lead, slide)
Dave Sherman – Guitars (rhythm), Bass, Drums, Percussion
Gary Isom – Guitars (rhythm, harmony)
Bobby Liebling – Vocals, Guitars (lead, rhythm), Bass, Percussion

www.svartrecords.com
www.facebook.com/svartrecords

Bobby Liebling & Dave Sherman Basement Chronicles, “South of the Swamp”

While the hard data tells us that Vancouver is located in British Columbia, tucked neatly on the northern side of the US/Canada border along the Pacific Coast, you might be forgiven for watching/listening to Dead Quiet‘s “Of Sound and Fury” and assuming the band is Swedish. The five-piece issued their third long-player, Truth and Ruin (discussed here), on the tail end of last year’s lost summer, and if they’re looking to remind listeners of the record’s sundry strengths — the Scandi-esque fluidity with which they bring together classic heavy rock sounds and modern production and tonality among them, as heard here — “Of Sound and Fury” is a righteous place to start.

Maybe it’s the organ, or the subtle underpinning of precision in delivery that tips hand to the players’ roots in more aggressive fare, but these two are elements working decidedly in favor of “Of Sound and Fury” and Dead Quiet more generally across Truth and Ruin‘s seven component tracks, weaving in and out of classic metal and various other microgenres en route to the sweeping nine-minute capper “Cold Grey Death,” dropping earworm hooks all the while that bring substance as much as style behind them. Hey kid, you like rock and roll? Here’s some. And they got t-shirts.

I say this as someone who’s had “Of Sound and Fury” on repeat in my stuck-in-my-head mental jukebox for the last couple days: no regrets. The song is honestly enough of a sell in itself, but you’ll see too in the video the five-piece seem to arm up with various weaponry, and I think they might be enacting socialist revolution? One of the dudes they take down looks like Grover Cleveland and the other looks like not-Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, and the back-room dealings of capitalism would seem to be what’s being conveyed as they play games with people’s lives. Legit. Their Jeff Bezos lookalike must have been in space that day, lest we forget our modern-day robber barons.

In any case, the best part is when they’re all standing around at the end and it’s just a second or so, but they’re like, “Okay, now what?” Indeed, gentlemen. With sincerity in my heart, I wish the members of Dead Quiet good luck in forming a new provisional representative government. My understanding is that shit gets tricky.

Enjoy the clip:

Dead Quiet, “Of Sound and Fury” video premiere

Forming in 2014, Dead Quiet established themselves quickly with the release of their debut self titled record in 2015. By the time writing commenced for their follow up record, Grand Rites in 2017, Dead Quiet had found their perfect line up in Kevin Keegan (Barn Burner), Brock MacInnes (Anciients), Mike Grossnickle (Hashteroid) and Jason Dana. The release of Grand Rites on Toronto’s Artoffact Records was followed by two European tours, one of which being direct support for John Garcia (Kyuss), as well as numerous festival appearances including Desertfest Belgium and Into the Void (NL), further cementing the band as one to watch out for.

After a rigorous year of touring, the band had no intention of slowing down and swiftly entered the studio to record their third record: Truth and Ruin. Again teaming up with Artoffact, Truth and Ruin saw the addition of Mike Rosen to the band and further broadened the already keyboard laden sound they’d established on previous efforts. Truth and Ruin proves that work ethic and chemistry can truly refine a band’s sound to what they had always been striving for: heavy instrumentation combined with rich melody and uniquely personal lyricism, making Dead Quiet one of the hottest, must-see bands on the Canadian landscape.

Lineup:
Kevin Keegan – vocals, guitar
Brock MacInnes – guitar
Mike Grossnickle – bass
Mike Rosen – keyboards, backing vocals
Jason Dana – drums

Dead Quiet, Truth and Ruin (2020)

Dead Quiet on Thee Facebooks

Dead Quiet on Bandcamp

Dead Quiet on Spotify

Artoffact Records on Bandcamp

Artoffact Records on Instagram

Artoffact Records website