Being Dead
EELS
Bayonet
Some bands are miserly with their musical ideas. A few inexplicably successful bands are such to the point that they seem to include versions of the same songs album after album after album.
Not the case with Being Dead. They have the opposite problem. What could have been four or five albums worth of solid songs gets crammed into a single release. That sounds like a recipe for sped-up prog rock or cleaned-up death metal, but in Being Dead’s hands it’s more of a kaleidoscopic journey, something like every favorite song playing at once on the radio, and somehow spinning the dial is a miracle that results in a perfectly comprehensible composition.
Which is even more impressive when you consider that there’s only three people in Being Dead, and just like Taco Bell pulls off an enormous menu out of a handful of ingredients, the band has a limited number of tricks up its sleeve (a ‘60s sensibility, a jangle that can be dry and dusty, a penchant for dropping beats and coming up with unexpected vocal harmonies) that it uses to come up with this paradoxically dense and expansive sonic bricolage.
This makes each Being Dead album its own time-warping experience, something that seems to be over before you know it and yet impossible to absorb in its completeness. You must travel through each song, from the opening honeyed menace of “Godzilla Rises” and the road-eating shuffle of “Van Goes” to the head-spinning “Firefighters,” the painfully brief “Ballerina,” to the lullaby swaddling of “Goodnight.” It’s a worthwhile journey, and one you will start over, time and again.
