SHORT BUT SWEET: DEAD RIVER RUNS DRY — “WINTER”

Well, despite my predictions earlier today, I managed to find time to write another post. To be more accurate, I came across a new discovery that compelled me to make time for another post.

Dead River Runs Dry is an Australian band who e-mailed me early this morning. In fact, the e-mail was the first thing I saw when I fired up my computer after dragging my sorry ass out of bed following a grand total of 3 hours sleep. In a fit of impulsiveness I decided to listen to their music before moving on to anything else because I liked their name. It didn’t hurt that they also linked to a laudatory feature about themselves, with an accompanying interview, that appeared at DECIBEL magazine’s web site (though I read that only after listening to the music).

They’ve self-released a four-song demo entitled Winter that they’re distributing for free, and that of course was another plus. And the final plus is that Winter kills.

With their music, Dead River Runs Dry paint a portrait of a torn and blasted wasteland — damned, desolate, and dangerous. Yet it’s a landscape with its own bleak beauty and vibrance.

 

The music slashes and burns with black metal malevolence, the guitars ripping with sharp edges, the drums booming and blasting, the vocals spewing sulfuric acid and growling from the gut. But the songs also break into black ‘n’ roll rumbles that will get your head bobbing, and seductive melodies wind their way through the whirlwind.

Varied both in pacing and in tone, the songs have the capacity to to put a jolt through the nerves but also to fix their hooks to the sticking place in your head. They burn, they rock, and they soar. This may be a relatively new band’s first demo, but it’s very much a mature work created and performed by some dudes who clearly know what the fuck they’re doing.

Here are the four songs on Winter:

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Dead River Runs Dry have a new Facebook page at this location. At this writing, they have 89 likes. If you’re on Facebook and you dig this music as much as I do, go add to that total and share their page around.

Here are the links for free download of the music. The Mediafire link will get you a .zip file of the whole demo. On Bandcamp, you can download the songs one at a time.

MEDIAFIRE: http://www.mediafire.com/?7wp01e2917ot2p2

BANDCAMP: http://deadriverrunsdry.bandcamp.com/