Dead Meadow have a special affection for the bell bottom era's sludgier side. The Los Angeles-via-Washington, DC psych-rock trio have spent much of the past decade dusting off the knotty proto-metal of yesteryear-- as performed by bands like Vanilla Fudge, Blue Cheer, or Black Sabbath-- and pushing it toward darker, druggier, and heavier extremes. Coming two years after the band's last proper release, 2008's Old Growth, Three Kings is an unabashed homage to Led Zeppelin's concert film The Song Remains the Same-- packaging a live recording and a few new studio tunes with a DVD that cuts between performance footage and loopy dream sequences.
While the relatively high viscosity of Dead Meadow's music is an asset to the band's studio releases and live sets, it doesn't translate to the screen very well. In general, the heaviest personalities on stage at a Dead Meadow concert are the band's amplifiers. Stripped of the high volume and gut-churning low end, the band inevitably loses some urgency. During "Sleepy Silver Door" Jason Simon lays a strong case for his inclusion in the guitar-hero pantheon, but he's not much of a showman. His only stage move is to work the wah-wah pedal.
The fantasy sequences, which do a sort of headshop take on Alejandro Jodorowsky's surreal cult film The Holy Mountain, are meant to alleviate the burden of excitement during some of the band's jammier excursions. But they mostly just suggest that Dead Meadow does, indeed, have a sense of humor. Simon along with bassist Steve Kille and drummer Stephen McCarty strut about in wizard garb. During one animated sequence, a group of bipedal weed-creatures self-immolate, then the moon inhales the smoke and, well, you get the idea. The studio tracks are largely standard issue, too, the kind of groovy head-nodding prog-blues that the band can write in its sleep at this point.
As a monument to Dead Meadow's live show, Three Kings largely flounders. But when combined with the mp3-only bonus t [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| racks, it does work pretty well as a de facto greatest hits album, offering up solid takes of material from across the band's discography. And the DVD's main narrative-- three young men toy with the dark intrigues and are swept up into a bizarre alternate reality-- has some strange, possibly unintentional, parallels to Dead Meadow's own career. Here are three East Coast indie-rock guys (two members were once in the scrappy emo band the Impossible Five) who took a glimpse behind stoner-rock's veil and wound up tripping through a psychedelic wormhole, that deposited them, for better or worse, in Hollywood.
