It’s hardly a coincidence that the arc of Dead Meadow’s career so closely mirrors the surge in psychedelic rock revivalism that has occurred over the past decade.
While their hazy mixture of blues and brown acid may be as old as Robert Plant’s first floral-print blouse, their mere presence in the early aughts managed to bridge the gap between stoner sludge forefathers like Sleep and Kyuss and the barrage of bands that followed after with bushy beards and the word black in their monikers.
The link-in-the-chain metaphor may seem like a short-sell, but in this case it’s anything but. From the desert trip demeanor of their 2000 self-titled debut, right up to the bizarre homage to ‘The Song Remains The Same‘ that was last year’s ‘Three Kings‘, Dead Meadow has indeed been more torchbearer than tastemaker. However, the flames they’ve been fanning with each of their albums have grown exponentially, so much that the scene they once kept smoldering now burns bright enough to light a trail of spliff-tails from their D.C. origins all the way to their adopted hometown of Los Angeles.
The group hit that new hometown hard last Saturday, winding down a small American tour with a loose late-night performance at the Satellite in Silverlake. Delivered with the atmospheric ease of three dudes jamming in an older brother’s basement, the set was a free-flowing frolic through the peaks and valleys of their varied discography. The caveman chords of opener ‘I Love You Too‘ rang out with the heavy-handed high that defined their second and third records, while the shadowy ballad ‘At Her Open Door‘ captured the shoegaze smear that surrounded 2005’s ‘Feathers‘.
Singer-guitarist Jason Simon and bassist Steve Kille have been the band’s only constant members, with original drummer Mark Laughlin returning for his second tour of duty, having recently replaced the man who took over for him back in 2002. Laughlin doesn’t quite have the blood-and-guts bombast that the interim Stephen McCarty brought along, but his familiarity with Simon and Kille was obvious in the breakneck pace that carried a revved-up rendition of ‘Everything’s Going On‘, and his focus was undeniable during the boundless thunder roll behind ‘Til Kingdom Come‘.
Regardless of who is placed behind the drum kit, Dead Meadow still unquestionably belongs to Simon. His ability to blend bone-jarring tones with a seemingly never-ending stream of pedal-pushing solos is almost unparalleled this side of Tommi Iommi, and the on-the-edge improvisation that he ties each tune together with harkens back to the unhinged electricity of Leigh Stephens.
This time around, Simon displayed a dizzying array of extraterrestrial energy during the space rock epic ‘Beyond The Fields We Know‘, only to be outdone by the wandering whammy lines throughout ‘Good Moanin’, which were damn near virtuosic.
The set also featured some fresh material, including one track that had a Stooges-style simplicity and another that saw Simon shredding an amplified acoustic as if it was a sawed-off Strat. Yet it was a classic cut from their initial release that left the longest lasting impression of the evening, as ‘Sleepy Silver Door‘ was a larger-than-life relic with a funky bassline and a central repeated riff so heroically simple it could someday be buried in the ground for future generations to discover and no doubt use as fossil fuel for fires yet to come.
