Age, according to conventional wisdom, is supposed to bring some measure of contentment. Edges have been worn off, battles have been won (or forfeited), and the prickly dissatisfaction of youth has given way to a philosophical cultivation of stability. Real life seldom turns out that way, of course. But with age, our impulse to see everything as an all-or-nothing binary means real life’s messy mix of war and peace becomes, at least, embraceable. It’s a familiar perspective for the Dead C. Formed thirty years ago in Dunedin, New Zealand, the trio of Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats has spent the overwhelming majority of their lives carving a cruel, transcendent path through the tangle of the noise-rock underground. Sometimes corrosive, sometimes constructive, the band’s output has remained as steady as it is volatile.
*Trouble *is the Dead C’s first full-length since 2013’s Armed Courage, and while the band has only aged three years since then, the accumulated weight of decades is everywhere. That weight, though, is no hindrance. Instead, it’s wielded like an industrial machine on “One,” the first of the album’s five, number-titled tracks. Extrusions of static and microaggressive twitches of dissonance, courtesy of the guitars of Russell and Morley, dot a minefield rife with Yeats’ percussive skitter. Halfway through its twenty-minute sprawl, the song splits open just wide enough to hear Morley’s ghost-moaned vocals, a sound halfway between a mumble and a hymn. Similarly long, “Four” is more taut—a strangulated barrage of wah-pedal feedback washed in jazzy, impressionistic cymbal-work. As it picks up steam, it collapses spectacularly under its own mass.
Though Trouble is nimble and fluid, the Dead C draw mainly on the gravity of their years. There’s a mournful air to “Two” after the opening drumbeat crawls to a momentary halt. The guitars helix around a sour melody, curling in the empty space where something used to be. Here, the album’s utilitarian non-titles make sense, as if to avoid conferring any context or intent. Likewise, a vague sense of loss howls through “Three,” which is also the record’s only true interval of fragility; the ten-minute middle of the song lapses into unhinged, human-like cries of confusion, weariness, surrender, and ultimately rage. It’s an uncanny-valley effect that captures a primordial eeriness, ancient and unsettling.
“I think of myself as the Jimi Hendrix of no technique,” Russell told *Wire *in a 2013 interview. As self-deprecating as he was, his offhand comment is as true now as it was then. And it applies to the Dead C as a whole. At just over five minutes, “Four” is the briefest track on Trouble, but it’s also the album’s heaviest and most conventionally accessible. Motifs, if not outright riffs, abound; the song’s play of rhythm, texture, and dynamic borders on the metallic. It’s enough to make you imagine the Dead C, men in their fifties, embarking on a new career as a doom band. Not that they’d need to. With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.
