Dead C
Harsh 70's Reality

If you think you've heard it all in your life, if you believe that rock of the nineties after "Spiderland" is dead and buried, if you think you've experienced all possible musical forms and are convinced that nothing will surprise you anymore... then it's mathematical: you haven't yet placed "Harsh 70's Reality" by the Dead C, a New Zealand group, into your player's platter. In 1992, they released their masterpiece and definitive work, a double album of extraordinary lysergic intuitions and experiments, a triumph of cacophony and noise in the spirit of the best Red Crayola or Chrome, with whom they undoubtedly share the inclusion of spacey reverberations in their tracks.

Yes, it's appropriate to speak of tracks, not songs. The primary objective of this collective is indeed to destroy the song form in every part, creating new rules of dissolution. First comes the noise, and then, maybe, the music! In the sense that music is entirely subjective: everyone perceives music where they find it most appropriate, there are no rules or schemes in listening, so our artists think it's wise to insert cosmic echoes, dissonances (it's said that the group played damaged and defective instruments to increase the sense of cacophony), claustrophobic percussion, buzzing, and much more that is absolutely contrasting within their tracks. The first track "Driver UFO" would be enough for the listener to fully grasp the philosophy of these avant-gardists: if there is a composition in the history of rock that deviates most from melody, it is perhaps this; the suite lasts a full twenty-two minutes and does everything to become unlistenable: it spins around itself centrifugally, carrying everything that is "cosmic," as the title suggests, within it... spatial, claustrophobic, sparkling sounds, within which the basic structure is practically untraceable.

Trying to find meaning in all this is a utopia: the psyche must surrender before the advance of such a monument that swallows every form of musicality. Introduced to listening to "Sky" with the sense of bewilderment still in our ears, we witness a curious spacey garage-rock, where the bass riff is functional in creating disorientation and loss of consciousness. In the following "Love," the sound shifts towards dark and almost gothic tones, but always threatening it all is the terrifying sense of claustrophobia, greatly increased by the slow, rhythmic pace, just as in "Suffer Bomb Damage," there's a sort of sensory loss, highlighted by the advance of an organ in the background that envelops all certainty. With "Sea is Violet," it becomes clear that every harmonic element within the album is created solely to grind away possible appearances of coherence between tracks; the wave vibrations form an insurmountable wall beyond which it's impossible to attempt to venture with one's musical imagination. There is not a moment of respite in this infernal circle of the damned, in this abyss that crushes convictions, "Constellation" and "Baseheart" contain within them dissolutive contrasts between guitars: it's a cathartic tension aimed at purifying the narrow noisy spaces of the "feedback" from the guitars, the same idea at the basis of "Well Oiled" by Hash Jar Tempo.
The show ends with "Hope," which from the first notes contradicts its very title: there is no hope, the colorless voice in the background sounds prophetic and oracular; rock has reached a point of no return, at its nihilistic and at the same time cathartic peak.

Many years will have to pass before another journey into the perdition of the human psyche equals "Harsh 70's Reality", in the meantime, we witness impotence at ruin.