The Dead C Patience (Ba Da Bing) LP

Have a little patience. Yeeaaahhhh. Fuck that noise. The Dead C remains the most potent rock band on the planet. Patience is their blumpteenth splatter of meditational groove skree since the DR503 tape dropped nearly 25 years ago. Like '08's Secret Earth (Bad Da Bing), it also features four songs -- two long ones, two short ones -- and it's all killer, no filler. Clocking in at 16 plus minutes, "Empire" is a bleary-eyed trudge through the waste we have wrought. Its diffusion of guitar fuzz decay and lost in the dark riffage is as potent and hypnotic as anything the trio has released yet. Robbie Yeats' heavy-as-a-bag-of-bricks drums are unrelenting and omnipresent while Bruce Russel and Michael Morley ring every ounce of desolation and trance-inducing rot from their respective 6 strings. Then come the shorter but no less enthralling "Federation" and "Shaft" before the final "South" offers some almost-solace across nearly 15 mins of stagger and drift, bringing to the fore just how much of an influence these lads have had on Bardo Pond, Sonic Youth and other like-minded souls over the years (or vice versa). Who knows at this point? It's all starting to bleed together. The Dead C is as proper a place as any for ground zero of modern avant noise fuckery, and its shadow still looms larger than ever.