The Dead Heads

No, it s not George Dubya Bush and cronies campaign slogan on the death penalty ticket, but they are from Texas. And for the record, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, whose second album Madonna has been credited with putting some of the blood n guts back into primitivist rock n roll, are decidedly ill at ease about capital punishment, southern style.

The death penalty is probably not one of our favourite things about Texas, deadpans bassist Neil, lingering over Guinness in The Long Hall on George s Street a couple of hours before their debut Dublin gig.
To be honest with you, killing someone who killed 13 children and raped five people s wives and robbed two stores doesn t really bother me, but it s the fact that you could accidentally kill an innocent man, or that the government has the power to sentence someone to death maybe for political reasons that s the part that I don t like and it should be abolished. It s kind of draconian.
You killed someone, so we kill you! grimaces drummer and vocalist Jason. So basically y know, George Bush Jr. is kinda like a serial killer!
Neil: The funny thing about George Bush (Jr) running for president of the United States is, in Texas the governor of the state is really just a figurehead, he doesn t have any power, he just presides over the state senate. The real man who runs the state is the lieutenant governor, so George Jr has no experience at running a government at all, he just has experience at shaking hands and putting people to death and kissing babies.
Speaking of babies, the Trail Of Dead might be nice guys to a fault, but don t try using their southern fried noise as lullaby music. Recently, this writer vainly attempted to rock his four-month-old to sleep to the strains of Madonna. Perplexed at junior s persistent wailing, I consulted a recent edition of Newsweek. Right there, in a feature entitled Music On The Mind , it said, Babies hate the ugly tritone, in which two notes are separated by six half steps, like C and F sharp, and sound so unresolved and unstable that in medieval times it was known as the devil .
Doh!
Not that these Texans have anything to do with the nu-metal or shock-rock thang currently uniting such strange bedfellows as Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot and the Bloodhound Gang, although they do admit that the graphics, cover art, band name and website can easily throw you onto the wrong scent.
Thing is, the Trail Of Dead are actually a much more traditionally pagan American rock n roll combo, calling up everything from Sonic Youth circa Bad Moon Rising to Black Flag to H|sker D|. Madonna is probably the first gutbucket yowl of Yank hard rock since Nirvana s In Utero, although considerably less likely to effect similar Richter-scale embolisms amongst mainstream press and radio. Nevertheless, it s this primal edge that aligns the group with prime Who or MC5 rather than the plasticised punk of Blink 182 and their ilk.
As Jason sees it, Sometimes it s just so idiotic and retarded in the way it s executed, basically the four of us standing up there, bashing out noise and trying to make sense of what we re doing. It almost doesn t make sense in itself. But at the same time we put our emotions into it.
Certainly, The Dead don t make noise because they can the classic adolescent impulse but because it would hurt if they didn t. Neil and Jason reckon it s the medium for a physical folk art rather than teenage head music. And as the conversation thickens, the Native American elements in the Stooges Funhouse are invoked; tales of Iggy and co sitting in a smoke-pit basement getting righteously bonged until their collective beings merged into what Nick Kent identified as the O-mind a shared consciousness from which churned forth the fabled evil Stoogenoise.
That s actually a very Zen concept, Neil observes. You try to stop internal dialogue and all thought to get to this place where you think nothing and do nothing except experience life as it really is. It s like a giant sweat lodge on the stage where we meet our spirit totems and come up with something, like shaman!!!
He s laughing as he says this, mind. Such high-falutin ruminations are soon kicked into touch by quotes like the following:
We re like cavemen trying to ram the square peg in the round hole!
I couldn t have put it better myself.
Madonna is out now on Domino records.