In case you hadn’t heard, metalcore legends Deadguy are back with their first new music in almost 30 years. It’s an album called ‘Near-Death Travel Services’, and some people have said “it’s like they’ve never been away.” That, frankly, is bullshit, and should be abundantly clear to anyone with ears to hear. Instead, Deadguy (Aliveguy?) manage to buck the reformed-punk-bands-sucking trend not by recapturing their youth, but tapping into the rage and frustration of where they are now.
This isn’t to say that things aren’t still caustic as all fuck – we’re just not talking ‘Fixation On A Co-worker’ pt.2. From the opening salvo of ‘Kill Fee’ on in, there is precious little by way of let-up or politeness, the quintet going at it full tilt as though their lives depended on it. While the volatile mix remains the same – the hotwired awkwardness of Black Flag; mangled noise-rock stumps; a weird predilection for the off-kilter that suggests Die Kreuzen or Voivod – some of their feral energy has been reined in. Things are now more directable, more understood, and less likely to blow your arm off before you can get clear of the blast zone. There’s a chunky, chugginess to the guitar parts that hints at sludge metal, the ooze helping to lubricate the band’s cruel gears rather than gum them up or bring them clanking to a halt.
Tim Singer still sounds reliably deranged. His contribution is the make-or-break factor here, the frontman pouring in all manner of psychoses like bloody chum bucketed into the churning, shark-infested waters of the band’s music. He spends the album’s duration sounding breathless and outraged, caught somewhere between a panic attack and a spit-flecked monologue that’s been bottled up for far too long. He speak-shouts his way through a towering catalogue of ills, berating everyone from workplace connivers to moronic, big-mouthed opinion-havers while disbelievingly pointing out the crumbling state of the world around us and the role we’ve all had to play in its beshittedness. The concerns might be more considered and informed by a later stage in life than many punkers will yet have reached, but they’re nonetheless delivered with a sense of white-hot fury and frustration that’s capable of burning you to a shadow whether you’re 15 or 50.
It would be easy to sign this off with something trite like “it’s good to have them back” or “this is the record we need right now.” Instead, it’s not, and the only reason we might need a band like Deadguy to provide us with an album like ‘Near-Death Travel Services’ is because we have so comprehensively screwed the pooch as a species. So, we are where we are and we get what we deserve. And what we deserve is to be told, in no uncertain terms, what craven fucking idiots we all are for collectively working towards our own thoroughly avoidable doom.