Dead Meadow’s Old Growth misses the mark

Dead Meadow’s new album barely misses the chance to become a classic.

By Joel Schafer

Published Feb. 15, 2008

Dead Meadow is something of an anomaly in today’s indie music scene. Hailing from the punk mecca of Washington, D.C., their sound channels ‘70s guitar rock through a hazy shoegaze lens. It manages to win over quite a few music snobs who normally cringe at the thought of a guitar solo through a wah-wah.

The fact that they are on Matador Records probably helps too. Old Growth is the third Dead Meadow record for Matador following the twin peaks of Shivering King and Others and the more atmospheric Feathers.

As the title implies, the band has grown in some aspects. Steve Kille (bass) and Stephen McCarty (drums) have never taken much of a front seat, and frontman Jason Simon has never had the pipes to be a powerful singer, but over time he has finally found a good niche somewhere between Kevin Shields’ half-asleep murmur and Jason Pierce’s (of Spacemen 3 fame) breathy whine. This is a vast improvement over their self-titled debut, which was greatly hindered by his botched falsetto squeal.

Old Growth tries to play as though it were an indie film shot entirely in slow motion, with grainy filters and sepia tones gracing the celluloid whenever the opportune moment arises. And most of the time this imagery fits perfectly, especially in the dreamy acoustic “I’m Gone,” which is reminiscent of the band’s (arguably) most popular song, “At Her Open Door.” For a band commonly labeled as stoner-rock, they definitely know how to step back from the noise and craft beautiful ballads.

Most of Dead Meadow’s fans refer to Shivering King as the high point of their career thus far. Unfortunately for those fans, Old Growth contains none of the dense, brooding soundscapes. Instead, this is quite possibly the cleanest Dead Meadow record so far, which implies the band must have taken several fuzz pedals out of their effects loop and decided to keep following the direction they followed on 2005’s Feathers. The main difference between Old Growth and Feathers is quite obviously the production. The band seems to be in the same room as the listener, simply playing off of one another.

The low points of Old Growth come when the band casts aside their own interpretation of the blues that they have become known for, and try to create more traditional songs that closely resemble the 12-bar pattern. In doing this, the band limits itself, which leads to the creation of three very similar tracks. “Between Me and the Ground,” “What Needs Must Be” and “The Great Deceiver” could all be mistaken for each other as they all begin with a semi-clean syncopated guitar line and follow an incredibly similar song structure.

Two tracks in particular save this album from disgracing Dead Meadow’s respectable catalog. “Seven Seers” sounds like a bong-rip-induced jam and manages to invoke a very authentic Eastern feel. Even better is “’Till Kingdom Come,” when the band turns up the volume and the reverb (finally!). And while the trademark wah-wah makes many appearances on this album, never before has it sounded so powerful and not so cheesy.

It’s too bad the rest of Old Growth doesn’t follow this relentless thump. Otherwise the trio would have another classic on their hands. Instead, fans are given an album with too many mid-tempo songs that the band probably wrote in under an hour.