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Cross-posted with my weblog because my enthusiasm needs to be shared, and god knows, this music forum could do with some of the good stuff:
Dead Moon are (left to right) Toody Cole, Andrew Loomis and Fred Cole.
For the past 20 years or so, they have toured the USA and Europe regularly and have recorded and released records with no outside interference from labels/management, pressing their own vinyl, so legend has it, on the same lathe used to cut The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’.
Dead Moon are also the best rock n’ roll band in the world.
The downside of their otherwise admirable DIY aesthetic is that it has resulted in me living 24 years of my life before becoming aware of this fact.
So god bless Sub-Pop for releasing ‘Echoes of the Past’, a double CD retrospective of Dead Moon’s career and giving me the chance to find out.
It looks like this:
In most UK shops it will cost you about £10-13.
Fucking buy it. When you’re a few tracks in, you will realise why any notion of my above ‘best’ claim being subjective can take a flying leap.
Every aspect of music that’s ever truly rocked, taken from blues, garage, punk, metal, classic rock, it’s all here.
And there’s no sign of the faux-nihilist retro-trash ‘rawk’ shtick that their name and image might initially suggest either: these guys feel no shame in using their powers to sing about the stuff that really kills. Y’know, the stuff that most heavy rock bands have always claimed to be about whilst they reduce it to a bunch of third generation clichés because they don’t have the guts or honesty to acknowledge the symbiosis between the music they play and the lives they lead. Stuff like love and heartbreak and being lonely and survival and rocking out, like addiction and revolution, like fighting the power and like caring about and believing in people, like driving all night on an empty stomach…. basically Dead Moon just holler the fucking blues with a clarity and power that most other white guitar-slingers don’t even PRETEND to have seen the face of anymore.
They are the band that fully embodies the definition of The Great Rock N’ Roll Transcendence Moment, as thrashed out by me and Lester Bangs and Iggy and John Sinclair in our imaginary astral meeting in my head a couple of years ago.
Imagine about 50 songs worth of this, blasted out live-to-tape in a basement with everything in the red, and you will have imagined ‘Echoes of the Past’.
For as long as I can remember I have been slowly assembling ideas and bits of writing for a novel or story or script or comic or something based around the adventures of a touring rock band caught up in the midst of the end of the world. It is with no small amount of awe that I have come to realise that my imaginary apocalypse-defying super-band effectively IS Dead Moon, in all but name.
Certainly, if there was ever a group of musicians with whom I would feel comfortable fighting zombies, scavenging for food, stockpiling ammunition and following abandoned train-lines through deserted wilderness, Dead Moon are the ones.
And that’s all that needs to be said really. I’m sure I could conceive of some more clumsy critical formulas to try and encapsulate the reasons why Dead Moon represent all that is good and pure and right in the world, but what would be the point?
For seven days only, here are some MP3s:
Kicked Out, Kicked In
Graveyard
Johnny’s Got a Gun
Hate the Blues |
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