Album review: Dead Days Beyond Help – Access Denied!

Part of the fun of this reviewing gig is getting sent stuff by odd new bands you’ve never heard of. It’s like musical Russian roulette, or (more charitably) like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates – some of them leave a bad taste in the mouth, while some of them turn you on to a brand new flavour. And even though evidence dictates that such things have surprisingly little bearing on quality, you can’t help but look through the press release for hints as to what you’re going hear. The cheerily named Dead Days Beyond Help are a drums-and-guitar duo, the latter being played by a chap called Alex Ward who has collaborated with – amongst others – Thurston Moore. As such, I came to Access Denied! with certain expectations of Sonic Youthiness.

Those expectations were not deflated by reality. Ward and his drummer Jem Doulton belt out angular post-punk noise of varying styles and attitudes, producing a wider range of textures than you’d expect from a two-piece who seem to eschew post-production and effects. Naming yourself Dead Days Beyond Help implies a somewhat dark worldview, and despite (or perhaps because of) its moments of almost poppy melodic brilliance, Access Denied! backs that up with its overall atmosphere. Even the song titles, read in order like some narrative found-poem put together by William Burroughs, suggest the sort of bleak scenes that independent cinema does so well – persons with divergent mental processes struggling to make sense of the world, and failing (or succeeding, I suppose, depending on your point of view) spectacularly.

If you like your music dark, abstract and various, then Access Denied! should flick your switches nicely, as Dead Days Beyond Help are clearly interested in exploring all the possibilities at their disposal, rather than finding a formula and sticking to it. The title track is much like Napalm Death doing free jazz without the vocals, while “Covert Surveillance Program” is surprisingly melodic and catchy for a fast-paced instrumental. It’s a brittle and loud post-post-hardcore sketch, like Fugazi covering Russian Circles.

There are some tunes with vocals, too, though they are in the minority here. “Nervous Disposition” is like an unwritten letter to the world by a person afflicted with the condition named in the title, with all the tension and angst that implies. It’s a much more traditional noise rock format (if such a thing isn’t a complete oxymoron), with recognisable verses and choruses stitched together with lots of weirder and more abstract passages. Later on, “Sack” is like some lost proto-hardcore anthem, with a simple punk rhythm and ultrafuzzed chords supporting vocals bellowed into an overloaded microphone channel.

“180 Miles” acts as a pivot point into the second half of Access Denied!, as if Dead Days Beyond Help are fulfilling the narrative promise of the track listing. Its steady progression from the sparse and creeping to the cluttered and clangorous, its stark yet epic scope – think of pictures of Alaska – wouldn’t be out of place on a post-rock compilation. The catalogue of woes that is “Slowly Strangled” captures everything that Placebo should have been, but never truly reached; “Coward’s Wriggle” slips from the grip of definitions with its quick-change randomness. Proceedings close with the lengthy sprawl of “Doomed Forestaller”, which collects a handful of the styles preceding it and throws them together into a longer composition, just because it can.

Chances are that, if you’re still reading, you’re going to find much to appreciate on Access Denied!. But to be clear: Dead Days Beyond Hope treat music as something between a four-dimensional sandbox and a hiking trip through the human psyche, a combination of exploration and experimentation. If you demand more of your listening than quotidian clichés and obvious musical commonplaces, I suggest you try walking with them for a while.