Dead Language – Dead Language (Iron Lung Records)
I don’t know what the rest of his life is like, but when it comes to musical endeavors, it must be pretty nice to be Andrew Beattie. Though he was featured on one of the greatest hardcore releases of the past twenty years (No Comment’s Downsided EP from 1992), the breakneck ferocity of his projects and their power violence contemporaries remained a largely ignored subgenre until recently. Luckily, the past few years have witnessed both the genre and many of its original practitioners returning to the fold and creating music that challenges the long-held assumption that punk rock is a young person’s game. Beattie already proved his aptitude with Low Threat Profile, another group of long-standing hardcore veterans who are responsible for one of the best records the genre has produced this year, and with this debut release with Dead Language, proves capable of stretching the style’s boundaries and challenging its conventions.
Dead Language – Dead Language (Iron Lung Records)
I don’t know what the rest of his life is like, but when it comes to musical endeavors, it must be pretty nice to be Andrew Beattie. Though he was featured on one of the greatest hardcore releases of the past twenty years (No Comment’s Downsided EP from 1992), the breakneck ferocity of his projects and their power violence contemporaries remained a largely ignored subgenre until recently. Luckily, the past few years have witnessed both the genre and many of its original practitioners returning to the fold and creating music that challenges the long-held assumption that punk rock is a young person’s game. Beattie already proved his aptitude with Low Threat Profile, another group of long-standing hardcore veterans who are responsible for one of the best records the genre has produced this year, and with this debut release with Dead Language, proves capable of stretching the style’s boundaries and challenging its conventions.
During the recent resurgence of power violence, it has been largely overlooked that one of the main elements that defined the style in the first place was an avoidance of rigid stylistic guidelines. Many of the best bands of the original power violence era weren’t afraid to be weird as hell, an openness that helped to separate it from most other punk rock subgenres. Many bands attempting the style now use a few of the signifiers – the blasting fast parts, the lurching slow breakdowns – but fail to capture the experimental spirit of their forebears. On their first release, Dead Language, a band composed of Beattie, both members of recent power violence iconoclasts Iron Lung, and musicians from Walls, Pig Heart Transplant, and Running For Cover, offers an exhilarating re-imagining of the style that works more along the aesthetic lines of bands like Man Is The Bastard or early Suppression, without aping either directly.
This isn’t to say that this album veers too widely from its given genre – in ready abundance are power violence’s abrupt transitions between fast and slow parts, general brevity (five of the nine songs are less than a minute), and avoidance of any easily accessible elements. Which isn’t to say that the more conventional thrashy songs are bad, but the members have a musical vocabulary that’s far more expansive than simply playing fast for the sake of it. Opener “Paranoia” blankets a bracing hardcore blast in sheets of turbulent electronic noise. This element pops up throughout the album, giving an already harsh album an extra layer of confrontational aesthetics that pushes it one step closer to a chasm of destructive sound. Other songs throw in less overt off-kilter elements that help keep the album unpredictable – “We Are Watching You Fail” utilizes an almost mechanical-sounding beat to accent a guitar part that wouldn’t be out of place on a Jesus Lizard album. Dead Language further explore this path on the album’s final two songs, “A New Dark Age” and “Misanthropy” – the former of which alternates between slow discordance (not unlike the Melvins’ harsher moments) and rapid thrash, and the latter, a nine-minute (half the album’s length) exercise in slow noise-rock dirge that piles layers of slashing, shrieking atonality on top of each other until the whole thing seems on the verge of collapsing under its own weight.
It would’ve been easy for any of the contributors to this album to revisit the familiar territory they had staked out in decades past. But each has proven a willingness to retain a safe distance from expectations, never fully shying away from their past but never embracing artistic stasis. Their music has proven consistently compelling, however this attitude manifests itself, and the Dead Language album is no exception. It’s an unsettling and harsh work that proves, even after decades, its creators are capable of memorable and challenging work.
–
Iron Lung (the drummer and guitarist for Dead Language) will perform Sunday, August 21st at the Bike Lot as part of Best Friends Day, alongside Corrosion of Conformity, Victims, Jesuit, Magrudergrind, Little Ozzy, and Dry Spell.
