DEAD PONIES

Posted by Brianna - filed in Events

fotl

Future of the Left || Listen || Watch

I’d like to humbly ask my peers to stop using “ex-Mclusky” tag with these guys, because with Travels With Myself and Another, they’re done fucking around. Every seemingly strange left turn from their debut, Curses, is stranger, carried further, and more focused and much catchier here. The band still starts and stops on a dime, the vocals are still layered and ambitious even when seething, the song titles still raise a challenging bar for the music to live up to (“Yin/Post -Yin”, “You Need Satan More Than He Needs You”), and the low-end on the guitars still sound like angry bears. Granted, this is how both Mclusky and FOTL built the niche that drew in a loyal, fervent audience, but Travels is the sound of band who still have a lot they want to prove.

With a few striking exceptions, most of the keyboards from the band’s debut have been ditched in favor of searing guitar tones (see “Chin Music” or “Land of My Formers”). Many of the albums’ hooks come from strident, almost militaristic melodies– I doubt that “Arming Eritrea” is too concerned with real geography, but damned if I wouldn’t help fund the revolt now after the record’s screaming, indelible opening track. The woozy march of “The Hope That House Built” is an existentialist call-to-arms, while the mid-tempo chug of “I Am Civil Service” floats up a few melodic, playful bars just to shoot down with its blistering chorus. Straightforward and snarling, these tracks suggest the band still thinks modern rock might be a genre worth infiltrating and upending. – Pitchfork

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Japandroids || Listen
Dead Ponies