Dead Meadow - "Old Growth"

Dead Meadow - "Ain't Got Nothing (To Go Wrong)" (Matador 2008)

Dead Meadow – Old Growth / Matador

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the ingenious name change four English teenagers thankfully agreed upon in early 1969, the legacy and influence of the band formerly known as Polka Tulk, mammoth rock icons Black Sabbath, still looms heavily over nearly every musician wanting to electrify their anguish into cascades of mind-melting guitar solos and psychedelic atmospheres. Every year or two, an American underground band eclipses their cover-band status and begins to spin the Sabbath sound, typically shaded with tones of Led Zepplin, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer and Pink Floyd as well, into a new contagious vibe of fuzzy bliss, bluesy bombast and stoner sanctity.

D.C.’s Dead Meadow – with the 2003 Matador debut Shivering King and Others, their third proper full-length – fulfilled this near-annual prophecy with a career highlight. 2005’s follow-up, Feathers, found the band wearing a bit less black and a bit more psychedelic swirl. Their apathetic stoner stumble slipped into an eddy of Floyd-ish acid jangle. Not a terrible direction for a band looking to diversify its approach, but a slight disappointment for fans hung up on the guitar solo ear-fry and bluesy confrontation of the previous efforts.

Nearly three years to the day since Feathers dropped comes Old Growth, Dead Meadow’s third release for major-indie Matador Records. The elements of the trio’s sound are still in place: singer-guitarist Jason Simon’s nasal, Neil Young-derived whine, cyclical blues-heavy riffs and wah-wah friendly pedal-board, bassist Steve Kille’s crunchy, lilting undercurrent and the patient 70s hard-rock pummel of drummer Stephen McCarty. Then how come the Black I want to compare it to is no longer followed by Sabbath but Rebel Motorcycle Club?

The obvious culprit is overproduction. A bigger budget certainly opens possibilities for a band to experiment with their sound, but it also more often than not deteriorates urgency. It landed the band at Sunset Sound – an aged West Hollywood studio with a cheesy Jim Morrison legend – for half the recording instead of solely capturing their previously haunting sound in the abandoned rural Indiana guesthouse that was the location for the remaining of the tracking. For example, “Ain’t Got Nothing (To Go Wrong)” features the band in a familiar setting: electrified blues with a steady, punchy backbeat and Simon’s wondering narratives. And the expected guitar solo awes with a slight echo-delay blossoming into cascades of warm, wah-wahing guitar tones and a nearly over-modulating climax ebbing into a familiar blues sobering. But it doesn’t over-modulate when doing so would have accentuated the energy tenfold, not to mention it is the album’s longest instrumental outburst at barely three minutes.

So instead a lo-fi labor of love where every inch of tape is a potential moment of psych bombast, you get a crisp collection of compact ideas that are downright radio friendly. This is not too much of a stab at the band, but who gets stoned in under four-minutes? It takes a period of time for the THC just to work its way into the central nervous system, at which point a smoldering guitar solo can be slow-downed, strung-out and melted into the consciousness of the listener. Old Growth certainly has a good number of moments that will have you nodding in appreciation, but they almost always evaporate before you can really get lost in them. Besides, who is still not reeling from the Sabbathian punch in the mind’s eye of Black Mountain’s In the Future released just a few weeks ago? Talk about poor timing.