Listen: The Dead C “5”…
Experimental New Zealand trio The Dead C returned to Ba Da Bing! this month with the release of their 2xLP, Trouble. Hailing from the countries remote South Island, Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats continue to ruthlessly challenge musical conventions while holding true to a DIY aesthetic that has kept them in good stead for thirty years running. Trouble, recorded in 2013 at Chicks Hotel and mastered in 2015, finds the group in an irascible mood across its’ five tracks.
Today we take a listen to the album’s closing minutes, a track listed here as “5”, but according to the record’s listing is called “4”—even though it’s the fifth and closing song. Really, that’s the perfect ruse for getting at the spirit of The Dead C’s aesthetic. Continually resisting conventional order, conceptually as well as musically, you can hear that even in these closing minutes of Trouble—or is it Troubled. Emerging as a gnarly, almost formed nugget of swamp doom, this track begins a slow devolution almost as quickly as it gets started. Its’ initial surge of energy, a monstrous, down-turned groove, is run into the muck just as it picks up steam, and instead of closing with a grandstanding rally, The Dead C finish like a buzzing hornet dying in a capped jar.
