Memories Like Ghosts: The Festival of Dead Deer

Friday, September 28, 2018

The Festival of Dead Deer

Before there were Moving Units, Year Future, and Ground Unicorn Horn, there was Chris Hathwell, who plays in all three and there was his great, doomed punk band The Festival of Dead Deer. They were great because the noise they made could melt steel and boil blood, and they were doomed because they reared up fast, spat out beautiful music, then vanished into the ether. Their album The Many Faces of Mental Illness (ThreeOneG) gives us 14 faces of mental illness in 44:57 minutes of frantic, stained-to-nothing vocals, sludgy razor sharp breakdowns, and song structure that bucks from one extreme to the next. We see guitar leads as attacking snakes, drums that co-opt hardcore's blast beats and R&B's submarine groove. It has all the screaming beauty of Gravity's catalogue, the kind of angularity a million bands have since tried for, in turn turning the very idea of angularity (or at least the search for it) into a joke. This record isn't a joke. It's not a half-ass screamo cash in or a trend-searching fashion parade. Take all your preconceptions and theories of what punk is and flush 'em down the fucking shitter. This is the sound of bones crushing to dust. Love it or get out of the way and pretend you're not afraid to look the thing in the eye.

Source: https://www.last.fm/music/The+Festival+of+Dead+Deer/+wiki

The Festival of Dead Deer 7" (1996)

The Spleen Position

01 Before Narcolepsy

02 Hunting

The Appendix Position

03 Limited Edition of Zero

04 Inner Planetary Reasoning

The Many Faces Of Mental Illness (A Collection) (1998)

01 Before Narcolepsy

02 Hunting

03 Limited Edition of Zero

04 Inner Planetary Reasoning

05 What Makes Sense

06 Basura Blanca

07 My Name's Explicit

08 A Controlled Response

09 In Fifty Words or Less

10 Episodes

11 Rated Are

12 The Coming of Going

The Festival Of Dead Deer/The Crimson Curse Split 7" (1999)

01 The Festival of Dead Deer - Monotones

02 The Festival of Dead Deer - Stagnant

03 The Crimson Curse - Psycho 75

04 The Crimson Curse - Funeral Empire

Monday, September 17, 2018

The Crimson Curse

Founded in 1998, The Crimson Curse was Pearson's first group to include keyboards and elements of deathrock. According to Pearson the band was an attempt to return a sense of lunacy and excitement to the hardcore punk scene, which had begun to appear dry and pedantic to Pearson. Pearson says he modeled the group on the Dead Boys. The band also included Jimmy LaValle and Jesse F Keeler of Death from Above 1979/ MSTRKRFT. Pearson has stated "we got all these fucked up kids together. Made some punk music. That was it. But as a band we didn't get very far." A review of the band's first demo stated "The recording was horrible, but was enough for me to realize that they sounded godlike."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Pearson

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