Wrecking Ball

Dead Confederate is a band from Georgia that sounds like a band from Seattle. Specifically, they kinda sound like Nirvana. Where that’s an affectation for a lot of really shitty bands, in Dead Confederate’s case, it’s a coincidence for a pretty good band. Hardy Morris just sounds (sometimes) like Kurt Cobain, especially on “Heavy Petting,” which is the first noise you hear on Dead Confederate’s plenty noisy debut, Wrecking Ball.

Wrecking Ball is a broody fucker of an album, taking its sweet time to stagger between maudlin and morose and burying its melodies deep under crunchy guitars, heavy bass, and Morris’s Cobainesque growl.  I’ve waded into the murky depths of Wrecking Ball many a time now and it gets better on each trip, but stand warned – you may not want to work this hard to like a rock album.

The problem is, nowadays, most people who traffic in broody rock stumble easily into emo-territory. Dead Confederate manages to keep the tension going without ever straying into My Chemcial Romance-style faux-anthems or the “getting dumped is just the worst thing ever”-isms of, say, Fall Out Boy.  Of course, I can only make out about half the words on Wrecking Ball, but I don’t detect the tell-tale stink of radio-friendly emo crap.  To get back to the album opener, “Heavy Petting,” seems to be about lying awake at night obsessing over getting that special someone to round third base and head for home, so to speak.

Wrecking Ball is but ten tracks long but clocks in close to an hour, meaning a lot of these songs build up for a long-ass time and then wander around a bit before finding the door. It’s the impenetrable shit that Hum used to do, which may sound like damning with faint praise, but it really means that I have hopes that Dead Confederate will one day produce an album as awesome as You’d Prefer An Astronaut.

Morris has a great voice to lend the proceedings and, like the dearly departed Cobain, he can go from a croon to a howl in a matter of seconds without sounding like a poser. Morris’s croony moments actually recall Paul Durham from Black Lab’s early days, especially on the ballad(ish) “It Was A Rose.”

Wrecking Ball, upon repeated listens, does manage to escape its “everything you liked about 90s alternative”-ness, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it probably doesn’t need to. I mean, The Smashing Pumpkins are a shell of their former glory, Pearl Jam is basically a Led Zeppelin cover band at this point, and don’t even get me started on the Foo Fighters (if you’re confused, hurt, or angry by the Foo Fighters output in the early 21st century, I suggest you pretend they turned into The Whigs, who picked up the ball Grohl & company dropped shortly after The Colour and the Shape); so it’s not really bad that a band has sprung up that can combine all that distorted guitar nastiness with the sprawling atmospherics of good Pink Floyd (before Gilmour started singing full-time; face it, kids,  A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a shitty album, except for “Sorrow.”). Dead Confederate, on their CrapSpace page, tag themselves as Rock/Psychedelic/Other and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of their style. I realize that I’ve just made Dead Confederate sound like a New Yorker comic of a rock band, but that’s for your ears to judge (plus, as I learned this weekend, the New Yorker has run one of the funniest comics I’ve ever seen in its pages).

The songs tend to get lost in their length, but some highly melodic and suitably heavy brighht spots emerge, especially toward the beginning: “Heavy Petting,” “The Rat”, and “Goner,” start off the album pretty well. Later, “All the Angels,” and “Start Me Laughing” bring more straightforward rocking before you descend into the two longest tracks on the album, “The News Underneath” (just over seven minutes) and “Flesh Colored Canvas” (12 fucking minutes. If you’re hitting the 12-minute mark and the song is not “Desolation Row,” just stop. Please. Okay? Stop.).  Both these songs have their moments, but I’m starting to think there’s little to no reason to ever eclipse the 7 minute mark in a song.

Dead Confederate is a good rock band that needs to balance their best bits (the ability to write solid melodies and deliver them in an impressively heavy manner) with their excesses (that meandering thing has got to go, or at least be reined in a bit) and Wrecking Ball is a compelling debut for people who have dreamed of trying to create mash-ups of Your Body Above Me and The Dark Side of the Moon. You know who you are.

Am I Too Happy to Like Death Cab For Cutie?

If you were single and bummin’ even slightly when Death Cab for Cutie released Transatlanticism in 2003 (is that the right year? I don’t care), you probably got a bit of a thrill out of hearing Ben Gibbard sullenly sing, “So this is the new year/ And I don’t feel any different.” And if you liked good music at all when Death Cab released Plans in 2006 (and the incomprehensible single “Soul Meets Body” along with it – ugh), you probably went home and gave Transatlanticism another couple of spins.

My friend Zac has opined to me on many an occasion that now that he’s in a happy, long-term, committed relationship, he just has no need to listen to Death Cab for Cutie. I can see his point – I don’t really listen to their good old stuff anymore, despite the fact that I know the music is good. I certainly never consciously reached a decision: “Wow. I’m satisfied enough with my romantic situation that I will no longer listen to Death Cab for Cutie.” It didn’t help that Plans, Death Cab’s major-label debut, was a phoned in affair with one of the worst radio singles ever. I didn’t need Plans to serve the same purpose that Transatlanticism did (and Transatlanticism is one of my all-time lonely-guy albums) so I could look at it for the music without having to ride any emotional ebbs and flows that might come along with it. Good thing, too. Apart from “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (great song, dumb premise), there’s not much to remember about Plans.

So when I found out that Narrow Stairs was coming from Gibbard and company this year, I really had to wonder if I was going to bother with the thing. I heard that their first single was 8 minutes long and I was actually encouraged by this – Plans was a safe record, way too safe. The fact that Death Cab was leading off with an 8 minute single (their longest song ever for those of you keeping score at home) signaled to me that they may have gotten some of their balls back. Early Death Cab (listen to it) is a quirky affair; Plans was a Coldplay album. Narrow Stairs doesn’t completely undo the adult contemporary feel of Plans but it’s not the tepid listen that Plans was either.

So let’s talk about that 8 minute single, “I Will Possess Your Heart.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that this song, should it become a hit (is it a hit? I don’t listen to the radio), will join R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” (not a love song) and “Losing My Religion” (not about religion) as one of the most misunderstood hits in the history of modern radio. It’s a stalker anthem, building around a menacing bass-line and sung by Gibbard in a cold, detached, “I’ve got something for you in my van, little girl” kind of way. I’m serious, ladies – if a dude calls your local top 40 station and dedicates this song to you, fucking run.

The rest of Narrow Stairs is leaner than “I Will Possess Your Heart,” and reflects the fact that for this album, Death Cab tried to record as much as possible as a live and entire band. It’s a good way to go and the music thrives because of it. I’m not really gonna go into a whole track-by-track thing because it’s a Death Cab album and the songs are all about love and death and empty beds and et cetera. You know, the shit that kid on The OC was all about or whatever.

Narrow Stairs is Death Cab for Cutie realizing that they can be the same band on a big label and it’s an enjoyable listen, which I actually did not expect. I’m not even going to bother with the new Coldplay album but I will arbitrarily declare Narrow Stairs better than it. So there!