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LP
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QUI 017LP
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Capturing phantom drones behind dusty beats and haunted twangs, Ellis Swan and James Schimpl return for their third album as Dead Bandit. Locked into a musical language unique to their collaboration, the duo once again put listeners out to pasture across broad sonic plains, drums flapping like loose fence panels in the prairie breeze and bass rumbling like distant thunder. True to their previous two records, Swan and Schimpl keep the strung-out guitars at the front of what they do, whether playing a naked, desolate strum or running six strings through disruptive effects processing until they're barely recognizable. But while there are details of disturbance when listening to Dead Bandit's self-titled record up close, the wider impression is a smoother, more direct affair that toys with post-rock complexity and matches it with the emotional weight of melodic simplicity, gentle grooves and conscious arrangements. "Weeds" offsets its languid fuzz guitar with shimmering sustained notes before settling into a patient, heavy-hearted composition charged with heartbreak leads pealing out in the middle distance. By comparison, "Glass" has a smoky, half-hidden backroom quality. Its brushed whisper of a beat, lingering guitar drones and subtle sub bass come on like a dub wise flip of a sad-eyed country ballad. The mood maintains on "Half Smoked Cigarette," which captures the grey sky sullenness of post-punk and reframes it in the seductive isolation of rural America. While there's a thickness to the sound on these most direct of tracks on the album, there's also fragility inherent to the sound world Dead Bandit have been shaping out over these past few years. There's an even clearer direction mapped out in the vintage drum machine pulse of "Koyo," all the better to carry swirling effects treatments and moody melodic figures. Even in these ominous climes there's space for plaintive, endearing hooks which land as the most direct phrases in Dead Bandit's musical lexicon to date. The fundamental sound across this album holds true, but Dead Bandit are never bound to a singular practice. "Lucien's Bitters" strikes up a pronounced drum machine beat which comes on like '90s downtempo, and it feels like a natural vessel for the heavy, shoegaze tinted lament of the guitars. At every turn, Swan and Schimpl prove their affinity for all kinds of approaches, and yet the end product is a deeply cohesive, immediate listen that shows just how clear their creative vision really is.
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QUI 011LP
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Three years on from the desolate beauty of their debut, Quindi Records presents the second album from Dead Bandit. The ghosts of their past endeavors still haunt their guitars, but on Memory Thirteen the duo's delicately disheveled Southern gothic feels tonally distinct from their prior outing. Dead Bandit is Ellis Swan and James Schimpl -- the former a noted solo singer-songwriter from Chicago with a penchant for eerie, witching hour murder ballads and the latter an accomplished Canadian multi-instrumentalist with a bias towards heartworn, roaming soundscapes. Their instrumental collaboration has an open, lyrical quality which says as much as any spoken line, and on this album they've especially embraced the power of contrast as the listener is guided between scenes, sometimes within the confines of one track. "Peel Me An Orange" is especially instructive in this regard, beginning as a blown-out paean to sonic degradation and the acute sense of hopelessness it projects, only to yield to a lilting tape loop of twanging guitar before entirely widening out in an emphatic burst of post-rock optimism. Post-rock isn't noted for its banal cheeriness as a genre, and Dead Bandit aren't about to lay down feel-good drive-time anthems, but the sense of pulling at extremes of energy and introspection show Swan and Schimpl to be testing the emotional limits of their weatherbeaten sound. The cautiously sentimental mood of "Blowing Kisses" hints at the hard-won light which can be encountered while pointedly driving into darkness. Sometimes noise is a subtle device -- a looming bed of unease under the forthright pluck of Swan's distinct guitar tone or the cracking round the edges of a beaten-up drum machine. On "Memory Thirteen" the distortion on the bass becomes a central figure in its haggard waltz, while "Staircase" and "Perfume" leave the signal wet until the delay feedback becomes the body of the riff. Either way, the sound is never left untouched as Swan and Schimpl grow more comfortable in their exchange, blurring their respective sonic languages as they expand their shared vocabulary to create an album of depth, difference and devoted distortion.
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QUI 003LP
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Quindi Records continues to yield intriguing prospects as the label reach the third edition, moving from Woo's astral ruminations via Cabaret Du Ciel's sonorous meditations on to the dusty, dusky mantras of Dead Bandit. Maintaining the ambiguous creative practices of the label's previous releases, From The Basement reaches to the Earth for the malleable grit of post-rock while making the most of the broader sonic outlooks afforded by kosmische and electronic effects processes. Dead Bandit are Chicagoan songwriter Ellis Swan and Canadian multi-instrumentalist James Schimpl. Swan has previously released solo works including the stunning, inward-looking album I'll Be Around, a lo-fi Southern gothic dragging the husk of country ballads through battered signal chains. In Dead Bandit, Swan and Schimpl's artistic vision casts its gaze outwards on a vast expanse, where the distortion has space to stretch its legs and the drums pound out into open space. There's a common tonality at work here, the duos guitars telling a thousand hard-bitten tales where Swan's voice falls silent. It's no surprise to learn Swan and Schimpl's reference points include Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack, SF noise rockers Chrome and the imperial work of the late, great Mark Sandman of Morphine. You can sense Jim Jarmusch's America just lingering behind the road-weary thrum of "These Clouds" and detect the shadow of Tom Waits lurking in the raunchy lurch of "FF M". The pointedly titled "Sedated" calls to mind the slow-core movement and its rejection of rock n' roll's fixation on speed. Instead, tonality and atmosphere are key across From The Basement, although the ambient lull of "I See Her There" is the exception rather than the rule. Dead Bandit's desert sound has vibrancy and immediacy to match its moodiness, from the sultry swagger of opening track "Mud" to the bold and borderline bombastic "When I Looked Around". Like the previous Quindi releases, this record is inherently experimental in nature, but not at the expense of its warmth and instant appeal. From The Basement, an inquisitive pair with primitive tools look out and imagine a colossal plain as the canvas on which to paint their picture Includes download code and special insert drawing.
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