Album review: Dead Confederate – Wrecking Ball

OK, so this is a little confusing. The town where I live is home to a band called The Confederate Dead (who, incidentally, sound something like The Warlocks, and a great live act for psyche-rock fans). There’s another band in the States by the same name, and there’s also this lot, Dead Confederate… and it’s twisting my mind up a little bit. Imagine if you were well acquainted with The Rolling Stones, and you ended up reviewing another band called The Stones Rolling. It’s not that you can’t consciously tell them apart, it’s just that the words keep realigning themselves while you’re thinking. Or maybe that’s just me – perhaps I need to get out more.

But anyway, back to Dead Confederate, whose début album Wrecking Ball does a sort of gloomy alt-country psyche-grunge thing which is far better than that mismatched bunch of genre terms can really do justice to. It’s certainly not going to be to everyone’s taste – if you like your music bright and cheerful or fast and metallic, you’ll probably not get a lot from it – but given the way things seem to be leaning to slower, darker and wider forms of alternative rock right now, they may just have timed things perfectly.

Comparisons are lazy, but they’re sometimes helpful, too, so try this for size – Dead Confederate are like a Bible Belt take on the narcoleptic world-weary Californian psychedelia of Dead Meadow. Where the latter draw closely on the blues, however, Dead Confederate have been rummaging through the pockets of country and Americana for some of their sounds and shapes, embedding them in a slow and spacious roar of grungy guitars and dusty keys. Think angst-ridden redneck wails, think big slow open chords on cranked amps with reverb-soaked lead lines bending and screaming in the near distance. There’s something almost petulant about it, something bitter and frustrated, something down-trodden but defiant to the last, a sense of inner tension restrained only by the patience and practice of a lifetime. Wrecking Ball is pregnant with the promise of all-out destruction, and it’s a mark of its quality that it never actually goes the whole hog and blows up in your face.

Don’t get me wrong – I like a good noisy rock-out just as much as the next person. But sometimes you want to step back and drop the fists of fury; sometimes you want to sit down and get drunk with some good friends and set the world to rights with words instead of punching the walls. And that’s the sound of Dead Confederate – angry, sure, but also controlled, thoughtful, introspective. Recent single “The Rat” brings distant droning Hammond organs, slow-slow-tremolo chords and more of those reverbed guitar wailing out a clenched-fist lament; there’s lots of space, but it’s inner space, the echoing chambers of the mind ringing with chimes of resentment against the hypocrisies of the religious right. You can almost taste the bile.

There’s plenty of variety within the limits of Dead Confederate’s distinctive sound, and Wrecking Ball explores a lot of it without ever sounding like it’s trying to please everyone. The overall tone is Valium country-grunge, like a newly-young Neil Young on strong downers, but there are also moments like “It Was A Rose”, with slide-guitar doodlings like a sluggardly blues belted out through a haze of painkillers in the back-room of the last bar in Hades, or the surly and menacing stomp of “All The Angels”, which balances clean close vocals with guitars swimming in a cathedral-sized tank of reverb and a looming sense of threat.

Wrecking Ball is a rewarding listen, equally suited to a walk in the rain or a languorous smoke on the sofa at the end of a shitty day at work, and there’s plenty of detail in there to make future visits an appealing prospect. I’m not sure that Dead Confederate’s aesthetic of brooding malice is going to propel them to household-name status any time soon, but for those of us who aren’t afraid to stop for a beer on the dark side of the street, they’re a promising new addition to the playlist.