Dead Tenants

We booked Queens noise rock trio Dead Tenants last year for our B.E.A.F. Fest (during Northside, it will be back this year FYI) and we are happy to find them in good shape with a new, super tense debut album under their belt, entitled "Void" and self released this past March. The ten tracks on the record don't miss any opportunity to conjure up visions of mosh pits, with the exception of "Void (Acknowledgement)," which is just pure guitar cacophony and spoken word. We dig in particular Gadfly (streaming) with its resolved dissonaces and odd tempos. See them live at your own peril at Silent Barn on May 4th. - The Deli Magazine

Oh my--this is exciting! I just discovered New York's Dead Tenants very recently, and in fact, I loved them so much on first listen that I took the plunge and bought their latest album, Void, from their Bandcamp page. I am not regretting that decision at all so far. This nervously urgent trio is driven by thundering bass riffs and a haunted, creepy outlook of the sort that defined "postpunk" in the early 80s. However, their energy harks back much more closely to the prime mid-90s days of chaotic hardcore, when bands who'd grown up on Black Flag were suddenly discovering Bauhaus and Joy Division and taking everything in a more hectic direction. If you're into Circus Lupus or The VSS, or even the early pre-disco Rapture, you're gonna need to hit up this show. Dead Tenants are gonna knock you out. - RVAMag

Muffled noise rockers Dead Tenants from Queens sound a little like Black Flag with an experimental edge. Their debut self-titled EP, which just dropped in April, is a jumble of twisting guitar riffs, melodramatic vocals, and loud noises. - The Deli Magazine

A split album usually entails the culmination of a handful of new (or leftover), recordings from two complementary artists, a most convenient means to co-release new music with friends. However, for Brooklyn outfits Dead Tenants and Drome, it means virtually two full-lengths-worth of new music, and their subsequent pouring out of everything they have, into it. Their Ten Dead Ants / Peter Milk split, released just at 2016’s close on Super Secret Records, offers fourteen tracks (six from Dead Tenants, and eight from Drome, respectively), stylistically embodying a crash landing rather than a new beginning at a time of transition. The record, as a whole, is something agitated and unnerving, frantic, and nuts.

Dead Tenants alternate their frenzied tone, almost song by song. One moment, you’re being hurled into the middle of a fiery whirlwind of rhythm; opener “Culture Creeps” and “Right Brigade” possess the sound of an 18-wheeler lit ablaze and sent barreling down an unevenly-paved hillside. The next moment, you’re dealing with the aftermath. “Fear” and “Parallax,” in succession, are the pinpointed picking through the rubble, carefully awkward steps to avoid broken glass and twisted metal. Its composition rips, and then heals, and then rips again. The guitar tones are shrill enough to pluck the goosebumps from the exterior of flesh, instead of their usual appearance from within, and the bass is grumbly and rolling throughout, a bitterly abysmal and lasting stomach gnarl finding no relief in the bizarre see-sawing ebb and flow of the songs.

(And if this is one’s first introduction to either of these artists, whether starting on the Dead Tenants side, or the Drome side, it’s probably more incredible than not to hear two such unique bands compliment each other so perfectly and appropriately. You can listen to the album with the Drome side first, the Dead Tenants side first, or the two woven together like an interlocking set of broken fingers.)

But for linearity’s sake, we’ll say Drome takes over the second half, and the transition isn’t so much seamless as it is a nod to what you’ve just heard, and an elaboration on the jerky, calculated construction of a song. Staccato guitar notes play off incessant percussion that emphasizes clacks and toms, a blindfolded homemade acupuncture remedy in the form of musical instruments. “Rump” and “I Assume You,” are tremendously heavy with some unknowable twang, while others like “Rhubarb” and “Lights Off” find their chaos more rooted in the frantic formation of guitar work. Notes scale up and down in hectic arpeggios that make you question the constancy of life. Nothing stands still. And Joe Maruca’s thickened bellows fill any gap that might form between chords, like rubber cement on a dodgy piece of furniture. It finishes in a most intense fashion, with “Italian II,” a building of feedback that becomes so unbearable it must close the record, and you try to wrap your head around the brevity, and the sheer grandiosity of fourteen songs from two bands. - Impose