If you’ve stumbled upon this review wondering casually to yourself, ‘Hmmm, I’ve never heard of DEADLETTER, all caps is a bold move, I wonder what they’re like?’ Then that was pretty much what I was thinking around three hours ago and I’m here to congratulate you, you very lucky and noble music website review wanderer. You are just about to have your eyes and ears opened to something really very special. I have just listened to ‘Hysterical Strength’ twice on the bounce due to it being just so fucking great. You could in fact stop reading here and go and stick it on, go on, I dare you, I double dare you moth…(stop that, no need for two f-bombs in such close proximity, it cheapens us all).
Commencing obligatory background paragraph – DEADLETTER started as a three-piece from North Yorkshire, drifted south to the bright lights of London and became a six-strong collective packing a more powerful punch. They released an intoxicatingly good EP called ‘Heat!’ last year which I annoyingly missed but urge you to listen to with particular attention to the excellent track ‘Binge’. There’s a great video for it to be discovered by all intrepid Internetland explorers where you can witness lead singer Zac Lawrence strutting in a field with a passable Richard Ashcroft swagger.
Now, getting back to the album – what a listen you are in for and even the more impressive as it’s their debut LP. From beginning to end it’s a deep, dark and hypnotic beauty. The bass and drums sit pretty high up in the mix which feels like a staple of the DEADLETTER sound. They come together to give the record a satisfyingly nodding and driving groove while the guitars and horns drift in and out to provide the flesh, melody and even hint at jazz influence. Then come the words, the words that beg you to listen and attempt to decipher, man they’re good. There’s real seriousness and poetry in there intermingled with some all together now choral chanting. Lawrence has been quoted as saying that his lyrics have got “…an empathetic tone [to them] but also a slightly misanthropic one because a lot of it is sneering and critical of human nature.” This was from an interview about the ‘Heat!’ EP but his words still seem to ring true for ‘Hysterical Strength’. I’ve read a few online comments that compare the band with Talking Heads and they’re pretty on the money. Lawrence certainly has a deeper tone than David Byrne but the meter is there together with the band’s wonderfully clattering post-punk sound.
I’m not going to pick the record apart track by track because that can often lead to an unnecessarily tedious read and you don’t want the joy of discovery to be ruined by ‘skip to this bit signposts’. Let’s just to say that each song has moments of peak, trough and collision. Each one has an indelibly killer groove and each one has very little about it to dislike or to turn you off. EXCEPT (sorry the band) except the one thing that I can’t unhear, and that’s the high pitched guitar that comes in at around 30 seconds of the opening track ‘Credit To Treason’. The song starts off impeccably, everything about it is bold and intense, when a whining guitar part comes in that sounds just like the Top Gear theme tune. There, I’ve said it, it’s out there and I feel all the better for it. Honestly DEADLETTER I doubt you’re reading this but, if you are, please consider losing that bit and not repeating it throughout an otherwise excellent song. Or maybe darken the sound up a bit? I know that the Top Gear theme is Jessica by The Allman Brothers Band and I know that guitarist Duane Allman is an actual hero but still, please reconsider.
That said, you could do much worse than spend your valuable time listening to ‘Hysterical Strength’, then listening to it again and then trawling through the internet for the ‘Heat!’ EP and as many videos as you can watch (this describes pretty accurately the last three or so hours of my life). Thank you DEADLETTER, you’ve given us a treat with a solid 4/5 record with a potential half a point lost for making me think about Jeremy Clarkson against my will (in my head he was just wearing pants but, to be fair to the band, that was all on me).
