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Dead Meadow turns a new leaf

By Joel Schafer
May 6, 2008

Courtesy of Matador Records

There’s more to Dead Meadow than Tolkien, bongs and a constantly rotating copy of Zeppelin II. The band might play its share of fuzzy, heavy riffs at a head-nodding tempo, but that doesn’t mean these guys are exclusively obsessed with classic rock.

“If you’re going to acknowledge that you’re alive right now, then you have to acknowledge that a lot of music was made in the past 20 years was cool too,” drummer Stephen McCarty said. “But I really don’t find myself listening to too much rock music in terms of recreational music consumption. It’s more soul and reggae and dub.”

Judging the band by appearance alone, the trio could be mistaken for a third-rate, lovesick indie band. But McCarty recently shaved his beard of three years and is donning a new, rebellious look.

“The ‘stache and burns is taking to the next level because there are so many dudes with huge beards now and, in terms of being in a longest beard competition, it’s really not a game I want to enter,” he said. “But a mustache really throws down the gauntlet in terms of facial hair because it’s like, ‘What? What are you gonna do? You think it looks gross? I don’t care.’” Mustaches aside, the look of the band could easily fool those prone to premature judgment.

Dead Meadow is widely known for breathing fire on stage and creating a physical live sound.

Physical because at such volumes, you can literally feel the sound waves crashing against your body.

“It comes with the necessity of turning up your amps to a certain volume to get the right level of breakup,” McCarty said. “It’s always been a part of our sound.”

Although its newest release, Old Growth, brandishes a cleaner sound, the band hasn’t lost its teeth when performing the album live.

“There’s still an extremely hefty volume, you know, it’s just that we’re playing better now so we don’t need the distortion to mask our errors,” McCarty said.

The title of the new album refers to several different aspects of the band: maturity, a love for the wilderness and overall growth as humans.

“The sound itself is slow, majestic and very strong,” McCarty said. “Old Growth came to us while we were on tour and checking out some trees. The phrase just seemed to fit and what we wanted to create.”

McCarty has noticed a trend among his peers to turn back to rock music’s more traditional roots.

In the past three months alone, Dead Meadow, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Mountain have all released albums that pay tribute to classic rock as well as the beginnings of indie rock.

“It helps when two bands who have already kind of been grouped together put out a record at the same time,” he said. “It helps different media outlets be like, ‘Is something happening here? Are bands releasing good rock music again?’ You know, it kind of makes it a movement.”