It'd be both cute word-specific coupling and the easy A to B if Dead Meadow played
Dead Metal. But whilst the D.C. outfit do appreciate the aesthetic significance
of dressing up in the right retro threads — flared pants and Orange
amps, head buzz and superfuzz, dopesmoker drawl and psychedelic crawl,
waves of delay and evocations of space — they really ain't heavy.
Their stoner caravan is less driven out into deep space than driven into
its own little corner of the party, only watching on as Ozzy-biters bite
the heads off bats amidst a devilish sea of clamoring hands. The Meadow
are all flowery-eyed wallflowers, pressed back into a pattern of paisley,
backs pressed against the wall as the room spins in circles, turning
circumvolutions back to 1971, their pinky-eyes gazin' at their Converse
kicks through rose-tinted shades; they wish that this divey house-party
was some be-in, and that they could be in it. Like Life. Peace. Love.
Music. The Dead Meadow humans press such sentimental sentiments to their
bosoms with, this time, their time referring to a different past time,
when music was neither career nor pastime, back when the sun shined.
And, this time, Dead Meadow open the blinds. Amidst a pallor of opaque
production, their previous disc, Shivering King and Others, made
them up in lo-fi pantomime and made them out to be the most dopesmokin'est
dudes since Sleep. But underneath all that wondrous, self-conscious artifice — the
crew dousing their guitar/bass/drums in so much faux dust-and-scratches
that their simulated crud buried riffs under six feet of sludged-out
earth — it was obvious that these weren't really children of the
Sun(n). And, so, with their fourth platter, Feathers, Dead Meadow
step out from underneath the fug and the fuzz, recording away from their
home base for the first time, trekked off to a shiny studio that could
lend a hand and some elbow-grease polish. The disc essentially finds
the now-quartet cleaning up and living right and letting the world see
them as they are; their tracks are marked by much clean-fingered guitar
playing (the added guitar meaning there's six-stringing back-and-forth)
and only a recreational use and abuse of wah. This all shows the crew's
true kaleidoscopic colors, which're rather like the candy-colored drug-rock
hues of the Brian Jonestown Massacre colored down, every primary color
dashed with a splash of black. Just not enough black to be metal.
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