Washington DC’s Dead Meadow became a reality back in 1998, fusing an appreciation of early 70’s hard rock and 60’s psychedelia with their love of writers J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. You know exactly where this is going, don’t you? Yeah, Snow Patrol this ain’t. Welcome to a land where lashing slow-motion guitars sound like an armour-clad warrior battling through milkshake-thick fog, axe symbolically elevated over the head. A land where songs sound like stoned dreams and where they no doubt dream purely in vast ambient soundscapes. And welcome to an album that sounds exactly like it was formulated in a shadowy hobbit-hole two doors down from The Verve’s ‘A Storm In Heaven’.
There is no paranoia, fear, claustrophobia or festering madness to report here, though it does hang heavy, swims in it, bathes in it, drinks it. It loves heavy in fact and has an atmosphere that reflects that. It never hails here, it drizzles as the air thickens, thunder grinds and sunlight scatters the landscape in chinks of light like a glitterball.
‘Suck Hawks Suck Hounds’ and ‘Let’s Jump In’, like much of what’s on offer here, are constituted by big mystifying bass-lines that swells ominously, met by lighter swathes of guitar spilling over the backdrop like hot air meeting cold, and mythical, reverb drenched storytelling-style vocals intertwine the remaining gaps. As already said, exactly like the Verve’s ‘A Storm In Heaven’, without the madness and with an unfaltering appreciation of Sabbath. Less an exploration and more a tribute, it’s a pleasing exercise nonetheless.