It’s a terrible idea to generalize but Canada has been killing it lately with their variation on garage psych from bands lately like The Ketamines, Needles//Pins, The Famines and Fist City. It’s a big place but this feels like more than just coincidence of a particular sound. I’m not ready to defend this fundamental garage theory just yet, but I can tell you that the four piece, Dead Ghosts, from Vancouver will have something to do with it.
"I sleep alone" takes that jangle and big time echo and jams it right up their ramshackle groove, barely held together with slide guitar and bleeding up into the needle reverb. It’s a kind of beautiful, weird sculpture in someone’s yard made by the local oddball who’s been tinkering his whole life welding scrap together. It doesn’t belong in a museum because that would ruin how perfect it is. It belongs in this yard with grass growing all around it. Dead Ghosts made their own raw hulking metal monstrosity, brightly colored and half tipping over in the side yard. It looks great and feels like a messily honest tribute to everything beautiful in the world. An organ solo pops in like the icing on the cake. Pile it all on. They've got a loner quality, a sort of bubblegum '50s garage combined with The Beets loose rawk. A somber affair and he’s not yelling - this is a beaten kind of blues jangle that you feel good about because it’s got something of a sad quality and we're also giving in to this cagey sound.
"Spot a trend" on the B-Side has that Ty reverb, clear, tight and thin right through a telephone wire overall a little spicier on this side. A harsher bad-trip vibe, the guitar has more attitude and this yelling vocal is buried under a similar thin distortion. These guys are out for blood now, happy to be a little more misunderstood, either at the end of a binge or at the beginning before they get too sedated. Plastic drums and a few chord changes but it isn’t even about that. It just it has to hit all of the thinner sounding rasps, with an out of tune solo. Its got nothing to do with punk except having the same DIY, throw-yourself-into-it spirit.
Get this from Randy Records. Full length is out on Burger Records by the way - home to every cassette you ever wanted by Hunx, Shannon, Natural Child, King Tuff...you name it.
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