The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Washington DC is synonymous with two things - politics and hardcore punk. Okay, the second one is a gross exaggeration, but for one DC group the bands that sheltered under the umbrella of Fugazi’s legendary Dischord Records were inspiration enough to instigate a life-long curiosity in music.

As teenagers, guitarist Jason Simon and bassist Steve Kille cut their teeth playing in various amateur bands in the DC area. After enlisting Mark Laughlin on drums, the group exchanged their original musical blueprint for sixties psychedelia and seventies rock. They went under the guise of Dead Meadow. You may think it’s ‘serious’ stoner rock. It really isn’t.

“I think the whole band is a reaction to the DC scene,” insists Kille. “We wanted to do something completely different.”

Different it certainly is. Not only are Dead Meadow far removed from punk rock, they also shy away from the soapbox that so many other DC bands step up to. Sort of.

For nearly 10 years now, the trio (Laughlin was replaced by Stephen McCarty in 2002) has created moods and soundscapes coloured with earthy, warm tones that drone and pulsate, sending you into an almost trance-like state. Lyrically, they explore writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Super Furry Animals are vocal fans of the band’s psychotropic quality and, at last year’s Green Man, they performed a festival-stealing set that had a vast crowd spinning out at their kaleidoscopic noise.

Their brilliant fifth studio album, Old Growth, seems like a coming of age record of sorts - an album that sees them accomplish what they originally set out to achieve.

“I suppose it does feel like that a little bit,” says Kille. “I think, as we were working on the songs, they became more concise. I guess it’s closer to the record we wanted to make when we first started out, but we just didn’t really know how to do it 10 years ago. It becomes easier to do that sort of stuff as you get older with the band.”

But just because the songs have become tighter and more “mature”, as Kille puts it, doesn’t mean that the band have left their crazy, fantastical horror ways behind them. The literary references remain very much a part of the Dead Meadow framework.

“People always talk about these fantasy writers and horror writers, and that’s all in there,” says principal lyricist Simon, “but it’s not really about themes - it’s vibes. Although, I was reading a bunch of William Hope Hodgson for this record. He was a turn of the century horror writer who wrote a lot of books with a nautical theme - ships getting lost on the Sargasso Sea and stuff like that. That song ‘Until Kingdom Come’ is actually about a failed polar expedition.”

Those with an aversion to fantasy and the like shouldn’t be too put off, though. Despite the band’s insistence that Dead Meadow is the antithesis of all they grew up around, there are times when they become a product of their environment.

“Living in DC for so long, you can’t help but be affected by politics,” says Simon.

“We definitely wrote a lot of anti-George Bush songs and ‘Heaven’ was definitely one of them,” adds Kille. “In fact the whole Shivering King And Others record is kind of a reference to that. But I don’t think we’ve ever tried to do anything that’s super upfront. I think that it’s way better to have subtle hints to that sort of feeling, instead of hitting the listener over the head with your political view.”

It’s a feat they’ve succeeded in for a decade - a lifetime in today’s musical climate. Perhaps it’s surprising then that they haven’t thought about calling it a day already.

“Yeah, I think everyone thinks about that sometimes,” says Kille. “Sometimes being in a band does make your life hard. But I think we’ve been together so long because we’re so close. We find it easier to laugh about things. If you ever hang out with the Super Furries and their scene, it’s like their own little clubhouse. That’s why they’re able to keep it going - they don’t take it too seriously. We don’t take anything too seriously either.”