Wolf Parade

Last time around in London town, bass-thumping drone truckers Dead Meadow were engulfed in a fog entirely of their crowd’s making. Thick clouds born of a hundred under-the-counter ‘cigarettes’ left the throat treacly and tingling, desperate for liquid salvation; tonight the sensation is similar but the brain remains firing on all of its cylinders, as dry ice is pumped over front-row attendees with next-to-no regard for their respiratory systems.

The DC trio aren’t the most visually arresting ensemble on show this evening – that honour goes quite easily to the rather hairier Black Mountain, whose groggy metal hip-slinks into prog territory with gleeful enthusiasm (we’re forced to miss Wolf Parade due to a sizeable queue and the proximity of a half-decent boozer) – but their alarmingly bombastic dirge is utterly captivating. The sole distraction is the descending faux-smog, which settles about heads already sucking, a la singer Jason Simon, back on standard 20-pack smokes. It leads many to rush the bar come the final fizzle of pedal-augmented squall, their throats as barren as the Gobi’s very core.

Simon is the most statuesque of the songwriters on stage, remaining close to his microphone stand, wandering waywardly on only a handful of occasions to play with effects and force impenetrable feedback out into the auditorium before him. It’s his bass-toting colleague Steve Kille that seems the most alive – drummer Stephen McCarty content to operate his kit in effectively robotic fashion – leaping on the spot as he hammers his thumb into chunky strings hanging about his waist. Such an outward expression of abandonment has a positive effect: people in the crowd are moving noticeably more than on previous encounters with the same subjects.

Feathers might be their latest long-play release, but Dead Meadow’s back catalogue is such that one song easily blends into the next, making for an almost unique experience: this set is like a single piece, fractured into suites of slight dissimilarity, continuity assuring that few faces depart from view throughout. Low-end rhythms writhe, weave and snake about drumbeats that, while hardly perfunctory, never really stretch the imagination, whilst Simon’s guitar is both caressed and sent careening into supersonic excess. The whole experience is admirable enough on a superficial level, but open your ears a little wider and you see the music upon the inside of your eyelids; with a few of those wacky tobacco fags inside you, it’d be borderline transcendental.

Shall we end on a fault, a minor gripe to blight the otherwise unsoiled critical canvas? Sure: Dead Meadow’s outlook is absolutely one-dimensional in scope and sound. Thing is, when the view can be as vivid as it is this evening, who in their right mind gives a shit about intricacies and the like? Not we, say we: keep trucking, boys.