In four years, New Zealand rock'n'roll revisionists the Dead C will celebrate their 30th anniversary, a rare milestone for any band whose members have never changed. Rarer still, though, is the sense that the Dead C are making some of their most vital, urgent, and completely cutting-edge music right now, after more than a quarter century of persistent exploration. Armed Courage-- their fourth record in six years for New York label Ba Da Bing-- is the mightiest work they’ve made since leaving the Siltbreeze imprint in the mid-90s. A two-track haymaker for dual cranky guitars and irrascible drums, with vocals and piano scattered throughout like an explosion’s neglected debris, Armed Courage pairs restraint with force, subtlety with volume and magnetism with aggression. During the last decade, the Dead C have tinkered with electronics, explored more conventional song lengths, and even released 2010’s relatively approachable Patience. But Armed Courage reaches back to their 90s noise squall and revitalizes it in toto. In turn, the Dead C deliver one of the year’s most essential rock records by ripping apart most expectations of exactly what that means.
The Dead C’s clangorous, demanding music could never be called casual. The fitful, almost desultory nature of the Dead C’s process, however, seems essential to the band’s success on Armed Courage. Michael Morley, Bruce Russell, and Robbie Yeats formed the band at the apogee of the Dunedin Sound, where their pals and peers created jangly, fuzzy pop songs, as though the 60s had been refracted through bad electronics and given a strange new accent. But the Dead C didn’t aim for a similar version of pop perfection. In large part, they could not. They were not polished and practiced instrumentalists; indeed, as the band near the three-decade mark, the members still profess to a certain technical incompetence, while generally avoiding tags such as “rock band” or “professional musicians.” (Russell's daughter, Olive, recently finished a charming little documentary about this disparity.) They’ve toured very rarely and, aside from the release of a new album every year or two, the trio has avoided the general promotional timesucks of the music industry. For most of their career, they’ve completely foregone all scripts, too, choosing to improvise the contents of their records in sporadic sessions of old friends and electing not to recreate those pieces when they do climb on a stage. It might be hard to believe that while listening to Armed Courage, a record whose pieces cohere so well that you expect them to be mapped out on a practice-room wall. Then again, this band’s been speaking its own rewritten rock language for nearly three decades. They shout it here with the sort of extemporaneous enthusiasm that comes with a shared past, not weekly band practice.
“Armed” bubbles up from a molten swirl, drums tracing patterns atop two guitars searching for their shape. Morley and Russell eventually reach and sustain a dynamic equilibrium with their instruments and amplifiers, with blurs of notes and the buzz of circuits cultivating a web of claustrophobia. In on-again, off-again bursts, Yeats fights against that entrapment. Sometimes, he lashes out like he’s just joined a grindcore act or trots ahead as if he’s rehearsing for a marching band. Other times, though, he disappears completely. The move epitomizes the patience of three people who’ve been playing together for so long and allows every move the band makes across these 22 minutes to have maximum impact. Yes, the Dead C play workaday rock instruments, but they improvise with the sort of communication you’d expect from top-of-the-line free jazz. You hear each member cede space to the others, massage a new element into the gyre and shift into sequences unexpected to everyone, themselves included. “Armed” sounds like a composition, but it feels entirely of the moment.
If “Armed” is about peaking early and finding ways to make that plateau interesting for more than 20 minutes, “Courage” is a slipstream of oscillating ideas and fragments. After staying silent for Patience, Morley moans occasionally throughout the track, his narcotized voice seeping perfectly into the Thorazine shuffle. At one point, the Dead C even march like a proper rock band, Yeats pounding ahead beneath sheets of screech and wail, making their influence on Sonic Youth and the mass of noise-rock that followed painfully clear. Minutes later, though, they play as if underwater, any percussiveness relegated to a subaquatic thump and the guitars gasping for a lifeline. The trio surfaces once again, just before it fades forever into the middle distance. The Dead C have built their reputation on racket, but “Courage” proclaims they’re also very good at getting very small, or at creating music from the sounds most rock might dismiss as the ghosts living within their old equipment. “My amp makes a storm of noise even at rest. People mistake that for a hissy recording,” Russell told Perfect Sound Forever in 2000. “No, it’s a very clear recording of a very hissy sound, and that’s something people have trouble grasping.” Armed Courage leaves no room for misinterpretation.
The cover of Armed Courage features a newspaper photograph from 1968, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. A Russian tank burns, while two Czech nationals march ahead in street clothes. “As ‘a band,’ the Dead C have used images of civil unrest, illegal warfare, and destruction of civilizations for the better part of 27 years,” Morley recently told Impose. This glimpse of active revolutionaries quarreling with total power feels forever appropriate for the Dead C. After all, rock'n'roll, the new converts are told, is a trapdoor for absolute liberation. Grab a guitar and an amplifier, plug yourself, and tell the world how you feel for a change. You can be the shirtless Iggy, sweating and slithering across the stage, or the unhinged Keith, unfurling the coolest riff you’ve ever heard as a cigarette dangles from your mouth. But have you seen all these decades-old rock bands, touring the songs or, at the very least, the formulas and molds and sounds they constructed decades ago? That’s its own form of glorified servitude. But after 27 years, the Dead C remain a fully liberated and aware band, capable of turning rock'n'roll’s basics into incredibly unpredictable music. The Dead C are lifers, then, who are too in control of their own sound to be detained by expectations-- of their own music, of rock'n'roll, of their legacy at large. Armed Courage proves the longterm vitality of that sadly rare strategy.
