vote
7.5
- Band:
Deadguy - Duration: 00:37:27
- Available from: 06/27/2025
- Label:
-
Relapse Records
Streaming not yet available
The second half of the nineties was fertile ground for the evolution of less orthodox hardcore sound and contaminated with more metal and experimental influences, with bands such as Poison the Well, Batch, Breach and The Dillinger Escape Plan, who have become real giants of the genre.
In the microcosm of what was then categorized as math-core or post-hardocore, the Deadguy are certainly the ones who collected less, due, above all, of a very short career that only three years, during which the five of New Jersey have however had the time to publish what was, so far, the only studio album: that “fixation on a co-workr” that still remains the first of the first of the first of Best examples of an attitude out of the patterns then carried on by other disciples who have become much more famous. A disc that mixed perfectly hardcore, metal and noise rock to forge a sound then evolved from there from the aforementioned The Dillinger Escape Plan, who will take the concept of dissonance and fragmentation of the Deadguy and will lead him to the extreme with “Calculating Infinity”, a masterpiece he saw behind the console just that Steve Evetts already producer of “Fixation on a Co-worker “.
A seminal album, therefore, for a band that has seen its career end too quickly to reap the fruits of what has been sown, at least until today. After thirty years, in fact, the Deadguy return surprise with this new work entitled “Near-Death Travel Services”, under the aegis of the always attentive relative, for years indisputable mistress of a certain type of sound.
His almost forty minutes are a dive back to the dawn of the Math-Core, a journey back three decades in which everything seems crystallized over time, it was not for a production (always by Evets) at the levels of today's standards, but which still manages not to play lacquered, indeed maintaining that tip of roughness that serves not to fall into sterile.
Now, of water under the bridges has passed and all the bands that were born from the ideas of the Deadguy have reached unimaginable evolutionary peaks, which is why a disc like this risks playing anachronistic and nostalgic. At the same time, however, this is precisely this perfect balance between old and new what would be expected from those who laid the foundations for going beyond the classic stylistic features of the hardcore genre.
And it is so that songs such as the opening track “Kill Fee” – with its neurotic and epileptic trend, supported by dissonant guitars – immediately throw us back in 1995 and do it in the best way. There are no melodic flickers or avant -garde pretentiousness, only that genuine attitude “in your face” that wants to look beyond without overdoing it.
“The Forever People” is devastating and sounds like Dillinger without jazz scores, while things get complicated in the brain “Knife Sharpener”, from surgical guitars and at the same time wild.
The voice of Tim Singer, as far as we lay on a lowest register (the years pass for everyone after all) is always corrosive and ferocious, forming one with music, as in the devastating urgency of “The long Search for Perfect Timing” or in the pounding atonality of “Cheap Trick”.
All this here sounds exactly like the never-born twin brother of “Fixation on a co-working”, with all his pros and cons. In force of things, in fact, this “Near-Death Travel Services”, although formally almost perfect in its wanting to remember where a good part of the best comes out between the end of the nineties and two thousand comes from, cannot have the revolutionary impact of the predecessor and the surprise effect is not the same, so much so that the risk, for the youngest or less attentive, is that of being simply branded as the work of an evolved Hardcore.
The ultimate goal of this return of the Deadguy is instead to shed light, for those who were still in the dark, on one of the missing pieces of the Math-core theorem.
Essential? No, but necessary to let us know a name remained for too long in the forgotten.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
