Some call it shoegazer music, perhaps because it really sounds best when you’re so stoned you can’t do anything but stare down at your shoes. It reminds me of a time when, with the help of a fair bit of psilocybin, I used my living room fan and my own wiggling fingers to discover how to see things in higher dimensions. And if I were to direct a music video for these guys, it would look a lot like that.

Banding together in 1998, the three founding members of Dead Meadow came from the DC hardcore scene, although you’d never guess it from their deathmarch beats and six-string wails. It definitely doesn’t sound like Minor Threat. But the boys did manage to get their first album out on Joe Lally’s label, Tolotta Records (Joe of Fugazi, for the Cali-snob punks), which then led to a second album, “Howls From The Hills”, also on Tolotta. After a live album and a “Peel Sessions“, they signed on with Matador for two albums, with a third now in the works. As of yet, they haven’t recorded a single album in a studio; barns, basements, and practice spaces breed the slow sludge of appropriately-monikered Dead Meadow.

As for their sound, Dead Meadow described it best themselves: a fusion of 60’s and 70’s psychedelic with JRR Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a true throwback to a time deep in metal’s beginnings when witches weren’t “wiccan” and hobbits weren’t gay. Influences run from Sabbath to Blue Cheer to Vanilla Fudge, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were contemporaries. You won’t find any mad shredding, nor any elaborate Bonzo drum solos, but man is it heavy. Think King Crimson played at 28 rpm’s. And it’s no stretch to hear the blues influence; “Greensky Greenlake” sounds like Gregg Allman climbing out of the grave, and the ethereal vocals make frontman Jason Simon seem like Robert Plant on a morphine drip. Songs like “Good Moanin” show a quasi-Eastern influence, while “At Her Open Door” is a Cream-y Jefferson Airplane with a hint of the Smiths. These guys have the amps on 11 and all pointed in, pouring out black on the souls of the damned.

While totally appropriate for an opium den or Kubrick orgy, I find it also goes well with long baths, general scheming, and lasciviousness of the best kinds.

“At Her Open Door” from the album “Feathers”