The Dead C - Harsh 70s Reality

I wish it was Driver UFO I could put up there as the song to check out but strangely no-one has put it on youtube. Ah well, you'll still get the idea.

If you love noisey guitars then you probably know it's very much in the canon. A bona fide classic.

Taking the noisiest, free-est parts of Sonic Youth, these New Zealanders jumped off into a whole other world. A world where Sonny Sharrock is treated as a true guitar god and his Black Woman LP went platinum.

I think they had something to do with the whole Flying Nun label New Zealand indie scene (which I'm only just getting into) but not too sure. People in the indie scene talk of Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine being noisey. These guys were off the hook.

Semi-improvised and you can kind of tell. Maybe on your first listen you'll be all like "yeah, it's just some random noodling and scraping. So what". It'll crawl under your skin though. You'll keep returning to it and begin to understand why people rate it so much.

Strangely enough, it's only relatively recently that I've heard it. Well, in the last 5 years or so. After the cambrian explosion of blogs and soulseek and youtube and everything else meant you could actually get to hear obscure underground classics easily rather than just reading about them.

I remember reading about them in hushed tones in DDDDD/Canister/Bananafish zines. Bands would get compared to them in Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers distro catalogues. Naturally there wasn't a hope in hell that my local independent record shop would be able to get hold of a copy. Perhaps Rough Trade might have had an import CD in stock but that would have been at least a fiver on the train and £15-£20 for the CD. Adjust that for inflation from the mid-90s and you'll never complain about the cost of a record again!

But yeah, eventually heard it and it was awesome. Got to see them at ATP a while back and they killed it live. They played last one evening so by that point I could barely even stand up. Slumped myself in a chair at the back and just let waves of guitar feedback wave over me. Great stuff.

You can now pick it up at the click of a button over at Boomkat for £8.99. I'll be honest, that is kind of past my 'fair price' point for a digital release but not past my 'you, sir, are taking the fucking piss' price. Anyway, here's the full link - http://boomkat.com/downloads/555864-the-dead-c-harsh-70s-reality