If you're wondering about my alias on this website (I think it's safe to say you're not, but fuggit), I couldn't tell you what the deal is. Maybe it's just that all us music fanatics are legends in waiting. I chose my own alias as the name I was going to give whatever project I could manage to record on my own. That hasn't happened, so I used it here just to give it a little life outside of my head. The name struck me as a good way to convey where I would probably go on a recording: desperately keening emotion delivered in a patois of sound washes and dripping, revolving melodic progression. Something very much like The Dead Science. These fellas are a willing nod into despair and alienation while cathartically transcending their malaise with some lovingly overwrought dirge cascading.
"The Dead Science" is a great band name, communicating much the same sentiment. Their album title Submariner, however, has the potential to be mispronounced into a completely silly-sounding moniker that a middling band (like Ash, for example) might ascribe to one of their releases. "Sub-ma-reen-er" sounds a lot worse than "Su-mare-in-er" as far as album titles (debut or otherwise) go. I know, I know. Who gives a fuck! But I like to think it's my job to nit-pick about these things: so you don't have to.
And if you think I'm wasting precious review-space, you're wrong. I have plenty of room left to give Submariner its due. Like Calla mixed with Xiu Xiu, The Dead Science have an uncanny knack for making depressing music that moves you with its surging urgency to an effect that may not be happiness, but provides a kind of sinister framework where you can imagine all kinds of thrillingly macabre scenarios with a dream-like grandiosity. The opener had me swooning with its warm upright bass and icy cold melody, matched with Sam Mickens' Craig Wedren-esque pained falsetto vocalizing. I know by relentless amount of fantastic rhythmic and textural twists & turns on these ten songs that this is an album made for repeated listens. Both "White Train" and "Batty" provide a good amount of punch to step up the pace of things a bit, while not totally losing the overall feel of the recording. Some may find these transitions unwieldy, but if you can handle Low doing their studio toe dipping, you won't be too thrown off by these shifts.
All in all, I have to say that this is a remarkably distinctive foray into the currently Radiohead-dominated field of mope rock. They bring some really fascinating technique and spontaneity to what could be a pretty stale vestige of music. At times you can hear Bark Psychosis and Echo and the Bunnymen, and there's nothing wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned. It's so subtly infused that it's more learned influence than highway robbery.
We need more bands like Dead Science and less like Jet or Ravonettes; but then, I'm just a die-hard gloom and doomer with no one but Radiohead to champion as they attempt to hold their place in the increasingly shallow mainstream arena.
1. Unseeing Eye
2. White Cane
3. White Train
4. The Ghost Integrity
5. Below
6. Batty
7. Girl with the Unseen Hand
8. Threnody
9. Tension at Pitch
10. Envelope
More about: The Dead Science
