4WD Touring Australia — October 2017

REVIEW

4wdtouring.com.au | 105

DEAD MEADOW // DEAD MEADOW

The problem with most self-professed gurus is not that they may or may not have any

particular knowledge that you and I don’t, or that they may or may not have good

intentions. In the greater scheme of things, sometimes things done with the worst

intentions can wreak the greatest good, and often things done with the best

intentions end up birthing the worst results.

The real mark, I think, of a genius when it comes to self-realisations is simply

that they ask questions. After all, Socrates was not forced to drink hemlock poison

because he decreed any specic truths or untruths. He understood, just as his

executioners did, that a question has more power than any answer.

Occasionally, though, life stumbles upon itself in the form of a man with an easy

way of talking who seems to have glimpsed at least the edges of things. And having

only glimpsed the edges, myself, all I can say for sure is that we’re looking at the same

thing. Watts, through chasing the eastern sun and, no doubt, immersing himself in

everything that the west has to offer the dedicated psychonaut, has walked along

the shoreline of the unconscious, where who knows what pushes waves up onto the

beach, where winds blow from some place that is unfathomably far away, and yet

connected to us as surely as the wind touches our face.

This collection of essays is a fairly gentle way into Watts’ mind, a path you can walk

easy, leaving more time to contemplate what he’s talking about, more time to let the

rain soak in than the showers last.

The ironic thing about the high country of the mind is that, once you’ve spent

enough time in the rareed air, the valley is not less than when you left...it is so much

more: it has become everything.

Value. There’s a word that’s thrown around a lot these days. Pay an extra

dollar and get 35 more french fries. There’s a deeper sense of value that

philosophers and musicians ponder on a daily basis. And Dead Meadow’s

debut eponymous LP is so many things, among them an essay on what

value really is.

Recorded for a few hundred dollars in a basement, this album stands

up against some of Los Angeles’ most cash-sequinned records in terms

of punch and musical ideas. It is a sludge-fueled march through the de-

sert of your mind, a long tarry ride in Charon’s boat from known shores to

unknown. Each note is a synecdoche for the album. The guitar-work never

feels put on, it never feels anything less than inspired, and nothing on the

album is really overcooked, as so many records that fall under the ‘stoner

rock’ banner tend to sound - oversaturated.

There’s a way to write this kind of stuff that, like good cooking, relies on a

measure of spontaneity, on knowing when to turn the heat off to let things

cool naturally.

And when it is done right, a record can escape the bounds of time. While

you’ll hear Harvest-era Neil Young, Meddle-esque nods and fragments of

early Black Sabbath, the album doesn’t sound like it was recorded back

then, or in the year 2000. It sounds, like the river Archeron, like it has been

caught in a loop, owing to the sea, and back beneath itself, dropping and

picking up musical silt, borrowing and birthing, becoming something not

trapped by the calendar, or movements, or even one man’s imagination. It

is simply a true album.

CLOUD-HIDDEN // ALAN WATTS