Description

Double single with lyric insert

Dead and Gone are a product of the same Berkeley, CA, club scene that produced mega-selling Green Day. In fact, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong produced the band’s first two albums. The band has been gigging around off-and-on since forming in 1993. Dead and Gone are hardcore punk revivalists, evocative of Black Flag and the Sex Pistols. They combine dirge-like minor chord progressions with churning punk rhythms, featuring nihilistic, gloom-and-doom lyrics that reflect both youthful pessimism and idealism. The four songs on this double single release are as good as the band can deliver. The title track is everything you’d expect from the band while ‘The Eye’ has a slowed down tempo with nourish narrative before suddenly exploding into complex, pummelling grind and finishing on that slow tempo. ‘Frozen’s chunky riffs, Fudge tunnel like heaviness, and multi textures shows us another side of the band . The last song, ‘Gay Black Mansion’ is the most distinctive of the lot and seems to consolidate all the best elements of the songs before it. It’s an essay in time changes, surprise, and unpredictability, though it’s way too short for me. The listener is given feelings of claustrophobia, angst, paranoia, and general emotional catharsis in a barrage of darkness bringing to mind the Birthday Party, Laughing Hyenas, Neurosis, Dead Kennedys. This record took a lot of listens for it to really get into it, but I think the effort was worthwhile. To me this band is the benchmark of real hardcore

Track list:
1. Shiny And Black
2. The Eye
3. Frozen
4. Gay Black Mansion