April 11 - 18, 1 9 9 6

Deadguy & Man is the Bastard: Noise and the Gnarled Helix

As quaint as it might seem now, the mere presence of feedback or dissonance was all an earlier era of musicians needed to make their music disruptive and wince-inducing. Such devices made the Velvet Underground, MC5, and, yes, the Who the vanguard of cutting-edge squall. These days it takes a bit more to dent the overloaded skulls of rock-and-roll youth. Speed, distortion, and atonality alone won't get you much more than a "So what?" But we need good doses of noise the way we need vitamins: as a tonic and constitutional for healthy listening habits, in order to hear anew and better. Not to mention the endorphins loosed by chaos's starting gun. Yet from noise and confusion we require more than just presence; they've got to leave scars. Which is exactly what happens on new albums by New Jersey's Deadguy and California's Man is the Bastard.

MITB have released a score of scarce-as-hen's teeth singles, a bunch of which are compiled on their D.I.Y.C.D. (Slap-a-Ham). Their basic attack is a seamless squelch of bass-driven fuzz, with a baritone vocal roar and stuttering drums. Rarely breaking the two-minute mark, the songs flash by in dragstrip bursts of motion. Crafted with the intent to pummel, they interrupt the progression of riffs with fills and breaks to tense up the momentum. The overall effect is of several violent noisemaking threads roped tightly together like a negatively charged steel cable.

Over the course of the CD's 71 minutes, the 53 songs pile up like a highway accident, intermittently varied with blasts of electro-shock noise and some fusion-damaged moments reminiscent of Black Flag's Process of Weeding Out EP (name-checking drummer Tony Williams on one song). The band's singles are as bruising a blast of commotion as anyone has a right to ask for, but heard collectively, it's a constant, surreal pull through unique soundscapes. The bass (sometimes two of them) looms larger and more all-encompassing than any guitar could, and the songs become totally self-enclosed spaces that trap you inside, evoking the phantasmagoria of the graveyard/acid scene in Easy Rider, but on Blade Runner's ruins.

Deadguy's Fixation on a Co-Worker (Victory) is a colder, more clinical blast. The 10 mid-tempo songs all have precise applications of noise, difficult rhythms, complex group interactions, and extraneous soundsmad into elemental building blocks -- it's a mathematically rendered strain of metal. The album is crafted with parts that don't flow logically, a collection of square blocks that have been surgically altered to fit into round holes.

Fixation's music is a gnarled helix of yowling voices, pounding chords, and needling guitar lines: it's the most intricate example of the band's work to date (there were two previous seven-inches and a track on the standout Step on a Crack, Vol. 2 compilation). Although there's the sound of white-hot anger throughout, it seems like an a priori condition rather than a by-product of the playing. The complexity of the music and the emotional state are both highly controlled, making the sociopathic assault that much more damaging. Just before this album was released, Deadguy split into two factions, the singer and one guitarist leaving to form Kiss It Goodbye while the rest of the band recruited new members and kept the name.

The bulk of these two albums is some of the more life-affirming stuff going, wrenching you through several uncharted hollows of free-thinking performance. It's just the sort of raw explosion that can blow the rust off numbed synapses. These days, that can't happen often enough.

-- Jonathan Dixon

(Deadguy play the Rat with Bloodlet Saturday, April 20.)