Dead Meadow - Dead Meadow

by Daniel Cressey

published: 2 / 10 / 2006

Label: Xemu Records
Format: CD

intro

Unashamedly retro psychedelic rock on influential American rockers' Dead Meadow's 1998 debut album, which appears in a new remixed and remastered version

If you happened to be drinking with a stranger and the subject of music came up no one would fault you for excusing yourself and escaping through the toilet window if your new-found friend proclaimed their love of "heavy psychedelic rock inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien." Unfortunately you will have missed a trick. Despite this potentially unappetising description Dead Meadow – for all their faults – are far from justifying a flight through the urinals. A deliciously retro, unashamed celebration of shuddering guitar riffs and fuzzed out vocals. So six years after its first showing the band’s debut self-titled album has been remixed, remastered and rereleased. And if there are Tolkien influences here they are pretty well buried. Putting this on the stereo is like owning an audio time machine, going back into the past as in some cheesy movie to right past wrongs. As every laid-back, hypnotic slab of rock drifts out of the speakers another music travesty disappears from memory. There goes Take That, washed away on a tsunami of juddering bass. There goes So Solid Crew, blow away by a hurricane of wacked out, near incomprehensible lyrics. Maybe, just maybe, if we all listen to this together, Lilly Allen will cease to exist. And that, surely, is reason enough to buy this.

Track Listing:-

1 Sleepy Silver Door
2 Indian Bones
3 Dragonfly
4 Lady
5 Greensky Greenlake
6 Beyond the Fields We Know
7 At the Edge of the Wood
8 Rocky Mountain High
9 Untitled

Band Links:-

http://www.deadmeadow.com/
https://www.facebook.com/DeadMeadowOfficial
http://www.songkick.com/artists/471526-dead-meadow

Label Links:-

http://www.xemu.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Xemu-Records-160065924031794/
https://twitter.com/XemuRecords
http://xemu.tumblr.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtf60U-J0KC1eQLbfgNU6yQ

live reviews

Firebug, Leicester, 2/10/2013

Anthony Strutt is excited by American three-piece Dead Meadow's psychedelic blues in a deafening show at the Firebug in Leicester

Babylon, Ottawa, 3/7/2004

favourite album

Dead Meadow (2013)

Richard Lewis reflects on much acclaimed Washington DC psychedelic/stoner rockers Dead Meadow's 2000 eponymous debut album, which has just been reissued

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