Review Summary: Hard UK indie rock, but not chavvy.
I feel the necessity to confess, upon listening to this for the first time, as the opener “The Boys + the Boys” started, I thought I was listening to a nu-metal album. But it seems that I got out of the habit of expecting an actually solid hard-hitting, riff-striking, shouty indie hard rock in modern days that I couldn’t grasp the fact that this in fact is one such precedent. Do not feel discouraged by the band’s brattish delivery and their near-hardcore, yet still melodic, instrumental play. This is at worst a banal and fun album, at best a fantastic musical escapade fit for anyone with a taste for tuneful harshness with production sometimes so berserk, even Shellac would be jealous.
After the aforementioned opener, the album proceeds to crash down even the most determined sceptic’s doubts about the quality. What should have been a priori a trashy, silly album, however musically entertaining, turns out to be a merry good time. The sudden face-slapping guitar riffs on songs such as “Enough Enough Enough” or “A Conversation with Concrete”, the obvious pop-punk influence on “Jessica” and “Petrol and Anaesthetic”, the frantic dissonance of “Up for Ran$om” or “Youth Screams and Fades”, down to the frustration stricken acts of emotional rupture on the title track or “Any Port”, it all just goes to prove just how magically versatile the band manages to be, while still being cohesive and easy to grasp. It is their magnetic, off-the-hook energy that keeps the flow afloat and savagely brutal, but never stiff or underwhelming.
There is hardly anything that can be said about Dead!’s debut ***ery, apart from: “This is mental! This is insane! This deserves your love!” The band pulls so many stylistic strings and delivers such a hellish, non-stop, mind-bending performance that it leaves you in awe and practically forces you to put it on repeat. So what could have been just a fairly decent punk-ish album, through the sheer energy and noisy production managed to work itself up to being impossible to let go and necessary to have in your life.
