Brendan Canty played drums in Fugazi; Rich Morel's a singer-songwriter with a side-hustle remixing Nelly Furtado songs for the club. The two met when they both joined Bob Mould's touring band (Morel and the ex-Hüsker host a monthly DJ night in D.C.). The stylistic gap between a post-punk legend like Canty and a song-and-dance man like Morel might seem a bridge too far, but Canty and Morel's pedigrees, impressive as they are, don't really loom all that large on Deathfix, their new band's self-titled debut. Canty and Morel bonded over a love of shaggy 1970s rock, and there's plenty of Big Star and Deep Purple's influence to be found on Deathfix, cut with swampy grunge, post-rock, and a touch of funk. So many new bands from established artists hinge on the tension between the two styles, but there's not much tension of any kind to be found on the surprisingly loose-limbed Deathfix. Unmoored from expectation, uninterested in rehashing past glories, Canty and Morel make for the basement, looking to make a racket all their own.
Opener "Better Than Bad" practically swings an arm out the window and asks if you need a lift. The glam-spangled, sweet-as-Raspberries power-popper seems to be at least 90% hook, its ribbony lead guitars driving the song's melody off into the night. "Low Lying Dreams" introduces the first of several unseemly characters, as Morel's Mark Lanegan-worthy leer gives way to a sweeping eastern-tinged crescendo. Faraquet's Devin Ocampo and Medications' Mark Cisneros joined Canty and Morel in the studio, fleshing out their demos with bits of their own, and the results are remarkably fluid, never showboaty, perpetually locked-in.
Most of Deathfix's lyrics concern themselves with the down-and-out. Characters sidestep sobriety, idolize wantonly, die in depressing fashions. Take "Hospital", which flits between the mania of a fever-dream ("the patients are turning red") to a young girl, a do-not-resuscitate order, and a patient's bed with a regrettably high turnover. Morel and Canty won't paint you a portrait, exactly, but there's enough detail in these thumbnail sketches to suggest a very real (and very troubled) cast of characters hanging in the shadows of these songs. Until "Dali's House", that is.
"Dali's House" is a goof; that's the only explanation. Riding a stock funk groove with a distinct jam band lean to it, "Dali's" finds our speak-singing narrator wishing he himself could house a loose gathering of cool kids from the annals of history: Jane Birkin, Muhammed Ali, Mr. Dali himself. If some guy wryly intoning a who's who over a locked groove sounds a little familiar, that's because it's supposed to: "I wish I was James Murphy's house," Morel notes, "because you can steal ideas, and Daft Punk's always playing there." It's kind of a rimshot in search of a punchline, but there's just a hint of acid in the delivery that makes it awfully hard to conclusively figure for a burn or a tongue-in-cheek tribute. Considering how quickly the song devolves into silliness-- "I wish I was the guy from House's house"-- we'll go with the latter. But while the first DJ to fake-out an LCD-expectant crowd with "Dali's House" is a hero in waiting, essentially it's just one of those jokes that gets less funny every time you hear it.
Deathfix quickly recovers with "Playboy", which charts a surprisingly nimble path between tricky jazz rock chords and starry-eyed, lighter-flicking balladry. But the snarl of its guitars can't keep the slow-burning "Mind Control" from getting a bit bogged down in its own murk. There's no shortage of dynamism in Deathfix's arrangements, a lot of little parts sliding past the periphery. But the strange paths some of these songs travel to get to their eventual crescendos occasionally gets them stuck in one place, or one mood, for too long. Penultimate track "Mind Control" gradually builds to a window-shaking post-rock climax, but it takes eight minutes and a false ending to get there. Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness and the fuck-around vibe of "Dali". The approach gives Deathfix a certain slightness that may rankle fans of either of its principals' more serious work. It's hard to imagine that bothering Morel and Canty much, though; they're clearly having way too much fun.
