Friday Full-Length: Dead Meadow, Howls From the Hills (R.I.P. Steve Kille)
Posted in Bootleg Theater on May 3rd, 2024 by JJ KoczanOn April 18, Los Angeles-based mellow-heavy/shoegaze fuzz psych rockers (and then some) Dead Meadow announced that bassist Steve Kille had died the night before. Here’s the text of that post:
It is with the absolutely heaviest of hearts that we have to announce our beloved brother, bandmate, amazing and utterly unique bass player, and gifted artist Steve Kille passed away at 12 am last night. Writing, recording, performing music with Steve felt as fresh; inspiring, and as important as it did 27 years ago when we first started playing together. We don’t know what words could express this level of loss.
That of course is guitarist/vocalist and fellow founding member Jason Simon paying tribute.His math puts the start of Dead Meadow in 1997 at which point the band was still located in Washington D.C. Their first album, 2000’s Dead Meadow (discussed here), was released through Joe Lally of Fugazi‘s label, Tolotta Records — see also: Spirit Caravan, Stinking Lizaveta, Orthrelm (w/ Mick Barr), and so on — and Howls From the Hills followed the next year, once again on Tolotta and once again with Kille‘s art and design complementing the music.
Got Live if You Want It would follow in 2002 (on Bomp! and The Committee to Keep Music Evil), and the trio were signed to Matador Records ahead of 2003’s third studio album Shivering King and Others, but there’s a resonant rawness to the first two records that can only come from a band getting their feet under them and discovering who they are sonically. In that regard, the languid unfolding, wah-drenched fuzz tones and warm groove of “Drifting Down Streams” for sure learned some lessons from the self-titled. Recorded in Indiana by Shelby Cinca at a farm owned by the family of Stephen McCarty, who’d play drums on their fourth and fifth LPs, 2005’s Feathers and 2008’s Old Growth — also the era that saw Kille‘s emergence as a producer and recording engineer for the band — Howls From the Hills was ahead of its time in both the saunter of “Dusty Nothing” and the punctuated slow swing of “Jusiamere Farm,” and while I don’t have a negative word to say about Simon‘s tone or characteristic semi-sneering vocals or the urge-toward-movement that Mark Laughlin‘s drumming brings to the later “Everything’s Goin’ On,” it has always been Kille‘s bass work underneath Simon‘s higher-end fuzz that
makes Howls From the Hills such a headphone-worthy listen.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in the stoned-in-the-summer-sun hook of “The White Worm” or caught in the feedback wash ahead of the Sabbathian march of “One and Old,” which becomes a classic-style outbound-jam departure before its 9:45 runtime is halfway through, getting louder, getting quieter, ebbing but always flowing before Simon brings it down with wistful but calming lead guitar over the last minute-plus. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the ’50s shimmer of the slide-inclusive “The Breeze Always Blows” or the sitar-backed bedroom folk ramble of “The One I Don’t Know” — which may or may not even have bass — Howls From the Hills highlights the particular fluidity that set Dead Meadow apart from most if not all of the turn-of-the-century-era heavy rockers, their willingness to let go of aggression where so many others couldn’t or didn’t want to, and the chemistry that was taking shape in their sound.
The last time I saw Kille play live was at the third night of Desertfest New York in May 2022 (review here), where Dead Meadow played the main stage between Big Business and the first of the evening’s headliners, Red Fang. You didn’t need to listen hard to hear the earthiness in his bass — there was plenty of volume to go around — and as much as Dead Meadow‘s style has been hailed over their years, records and tours for its floaty, drifting psychedelic aspects, in revisiting Howls From the Hills, the flexibility of craft that has let them go so many different places is so clearly emanating from the foundation laid out in the rhythm section. Kille could lock into a roller like “Dusty Nothing” or underscore the jangle of “The Breeze Always Blows” and still go a-wanderin’ in “The White Worm,” which is able to turn its exploration back around to the verse/chorus ending in no small part because Kille‘s been holding that groove the whole time.
Classic power trio dynamic, maybe, but in a context that makes it as much Dead Meadow‘s own as much as anyone else’s. Howls From the Hills immerses the listener early with the ambient noise and far-off feedback of “Drifting Down Streams” and is kind of a mini-blowout at the culmination of its eight minutes, but holds the same kind of deceptive movement as cuts like “Sleepy Silver Door” from the self-titled or the slowed-down trippier take on “Everything’s Goin’ On” that showed up on Shivering King and Others. The band’s live records — the aforementioned Got Live if You Want It, most of 2010’s Three Kings (for which Kille was interviewed here), 2020’s Live at Roadburn 2011 (review here), and 2021’s Levitation Sessions: Live From the Pillars of God — tell another important side of that story, and there too one finds Kille essential to 
creating that current-like motion beneath the surface flow.
On behalf of myself and this site, for whatever it’s worth, I offer condolences to Kille‘s family, to his bandmates Simon and Laughlin, and to the band’s many fans and the multitudes inspired by his playing, songwriting, visual and/or production styles. As part of Dead Meadow, his contributions have been part of influencing a generation of heavy psychedelia, and part of what makes Howls From the Hills feel timeless now is that records so individual to the artists making them never quite fit with their time to begin with. I don’t know the future of the band, and frankly I think it would be too early and crass to speculate, but there can be no question that Kille brought something special to the mix that made Dead Meadow who they are, and as always, that work will continue to live on.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Gonna keep it short this time (or apparently not) to sort of let the above stand on its own, but I wanted to explain a bit. I was at Roadburn, actually standing in the skate park watching Heath when Virginia’s Stephen Smith — if ever at a show, anywhere on earth, there’s at least a 30 percent chance he’ll stop through on his way to the next one — showed me the post above on his phone. In addition to needing some time to get my head back after the fest and travel, I didn’t want to be rushing to post something like it was just part of the rest of the news catchup. A person died. You want to try to honor that loss.
Took me a week I guess to think of writing about him and Howls at the Hills at the same time. I actually closed a week with the same record about 11 years ago — shocking to me how long I’ve been doing Friday Full-Lengths, and yet they’re still all categorized as Bootleg Theater instead of their own thing; makes no sense — but I figure after a decade it’s fair game if I want it to be, and once I put it on I knew I wanted it to be. I didn’t talk much about the band’s later work above, but in fact I was back and forth with Kille as part of writing the liner notes for the PostWax edition of last year’s Force From Free, and in my experience he was only ever a laid back, easy kind of person to work with. I’d say the same of Simon. Both dudes who, if they were jerks you’d say, “Well, bigger band, indie cred, sometimes that happens,” who were very much not jerks. That kind of thing means a lot to me.
Anyhow, to that’s the way it ended up what it is. Not timely, but with something like this, it doesn’t necessarily need to be in the same way it otherwise would.
I was at an appointment (actually with the same surgeon who did my meniscus operation in late-2022) for my mother this morning as she starts the process of getting one of her two very-much-in-need-of-replacing knees replaced. Bone on bone, no cartilage. A little left in the other one. Surgery hopefully in a couple weeks. But that was a drain emotionally as well, and with a weekend ahead of going to Connecticut to help The Patient Mrs.’ mom move furniture, Elephant Tree liner notes that I think need a rewrite owing to some misunderstanding of what release they were actually for — they have a couple things in the works, including the also-PostWax split with Lowrider — the regular batch of writing and having this afternoon to engage the inevitable argument of trying to give The Pecan a bath, which just sucks lately, I’m gonna punch out and call it a week.
I hope to do that DVNE review that was slated for this week on Monday — Sunnata are next in line after, but not next week — the rest of the week has premieres lined up for Maragda, Los Tayos (a Psychedelic Source Records project that will happen if it’s done in time; I love working with that label and I’m not being sarcastic), High Noon Kahuna and We Broke the Weather, so it will not lack for awesome. Until then, have a great and safe weekend and thanks again for reading.
FRM. I don’t think there’s any merch on there right now, but I’m putting the link anyway because support MIBK.
