LaRM day 101 (Dead Can Dance-Death By Chocolate)

Dead Can Dance expanded their sound throughout the 1980's, to incorporate not only more arcane instrumentation but also broader cultural influences. There is a strong Middle Eastern foundation to much of their work by the release of the live album, Toward the Within (1994). It's a fantastic demonstration of the remarkable depth of both their understanding of composition but also of their musical proficiency. Lisa Gerrard's voice is on particularly fine, otherwordly form and Brendan Perry's multi-instrumentalism is absolutely breathtaking. There's no getting away from the fact that it is still all terribly earnest, po-faced and, as a result, a little bit daft. Nonetheless if you can accept the gothy undertones and the sepulchral atmosphere then there's a huge amount to take both intellectually and musically from Toward the Within.

The Dead Kennedys were one of the bands that my brother introduced me to when I was really young that got me intrested in music at all. I still really love the idea that while in the UK punk bands were talking about nothing much, in the US they were going hell for leather to engage personally and politically with the world. Of course listening to it now it all seems a bit tame, but at the time I reckon it must have been thrilling. The Dead Kennedys first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980) remains one of the finest examples of how punk rock could be used for specific ideological ends as well as being one of the records that launched and defined the hardcore scene. Every song on it is not only a blistering piece of excoriatingly sarcastic leftist political analysis but also a brilliant tune. Although not everything on it is of the superb quality of 'Holiday in Cambodia', every song plays a specific and brilliant part of the whole. Jello Biafra's high, slightly camp vocals sit angrily atop a great ramshackle structure of tinny guitar and rumbling bass. Part of the brilliance of this stuff is that it sounds like it's made of sticks but is actually a supremely solid structure. Final album, Bedtime for Democracy (1986) on the other hand sounds like a band at the end of the line. It's a tired version of a hardcore punk record and although the political will is still brutally and majestically present, musically it all sounds like the band felt that the game was up. It's not a bad record at all, it just feels jaded and weirdly out of time.

Well, what to say about the Dead Weather and their second album Sea of Cowards (2010)? Apart from anything else Jon Spencer is presumably furious that all his work has been reduced to this irritatingly pale imitation. Sea of Cowards is an essentially redundant bunch of rip-offs of, alternately, Blues Explosion and Boss Hog songs. The really frustrating thing about it is that it proves that we were all pretty dim to fall for Jack White's schtick. I remember seeing the White Stripes at their first UK gig in a pub in Tufnell Park and thinking it was incredibly exciting, but in retrospect I wonder if the second-rate artifice was already there for all to see, we just weren't looking. In any event, the songs on Sea of Cowards that White sings are the most annoying and when Alison Mosshart (of the rubbish Kills, and disappointingly, formerly of the brilliant Discount) gets the vocals they are slightly better, but it's all pretty dismal.

The Dears are a band that I tried to get but don't. I had No Cities Left and gave it away and then picked up Missiles (2008). But I'm going to give it away. It's not a bad record but, so much worse, it's just a record that it wouldn't make any difference if it simply didn't exist. In the post-Interpol world this kind of stuff is ten-a-penny and it takes something pretty special to make a mid-brow, mid-tempo, "confessional" miserablist album stand out. And there's nothing on Missiles that makes it stand out. I'm sure it's all terribly heartfelt and deeply affecting to the band members but it means virtually nothing to me.

Finally for the week we have Death By Chocolate's second album, Zap the World (2002). As an exercise in hyper-ironic postmodern kitsch, Zap the World can't be beaten. We have lo-fi, hyper-stylized sixties style guitar, bass, drums while singer Angie half sings, half narrates her quirky, kooky little abstract poems about cultural ephemera (they have a song called 'John Steed Sword Stick' for instance, and a brief number about Bridget Riley and how her paintings can "make your eyes go pop"). It's cutesy, incredibly self-aware, very silly, and tons of fun.