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Keenan review is in, it's helluva favourable:
Much anticipated new album from the greatest rock band on the planet, New Zealand’s The Dead C: Armed Courage comes with a sleeve that looks like a renaissance painting of 20th century unrest, a feel that is bolstered by the non-temporal feel of the protesting sonics. Indeed, The Dead C have so completely formulated their own hermetic soundworld that the music now has a timeless quality, broadcast from some edge of the world singularity that is somehow always changing yet remaining, essentially, the same. Armed Courage continues the heroic tradition of one word Dead C titles with two massively extended pieces, “Armed” and “Courage”. “Armed” is phenomenal. Robbie Yeats sets up an almost-groove, not so much Can as Xhol Caravan, over which guitarists Bruce Russell and Michael Morley collide in peaking waves of six string euphorics. The feel is somewhere between the endless brokedown Crazy Horse-isms of a track like “Outside” from The White House and the kind of bloodyminded amplifier worshipping instrumentalism of albums like New Electric Music. It feels anthemic while still managing – somehow – to undermine every conventional signifier of ‘rock anthem’. Which is precisely what makes them the greatest rock band on the goddamn planet. The second piece, however, is even better. “Courage” updates the fractured up-close song style of Trapdoor Fucking Exit with some of Morley’s most implosive and teetering on the edge vocal narcoleptics, power crying over slowly teased out chords with the feel of true desolation blues, with Russell’s guitar moving from static hovering drones to suddenly collapsing downer chords while Yeats overthrows any notion of progression or forward momentum, opting for statements that have very little to do with time and function more as punctuation, grammar or even parallel visions of routes not taken or openings to pathways unexplored. How The Dead C continue to carve unforgettable ‘songs’ from the sparest of settings – just expiring chords, the sound of pure electricity and a drummer that plays lead – is still beyond me but this is an unforgettable work, a new apex of long-form thought from the group and the kind of album that burns itself into your brain but that still somehow remains out of reach, prompting compulsive repeat spinning in order to crack its ‘simple’ codes. A modern masterpiece. There remains no one like them. Highest possible recommendation.
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