Deadguy - Near Death Travel Services
I suppose that I will always feel like a novice hardcore fan. At shows I tend to be just fine being a human crash pad at the edge of the pit rather than an active mosher. I tend to like metalcore to emphasize the metal over the core. I think modern Turnstile is pretty good, actually.
I listened to the first Deadguy LP, Fixation on a Coworker, at the exhortation of my friends in Final Resting Pose. This is foundational New Brunswick shit, they said. Real Jersey metalcore from before there was any money in this. From before the MySpace generation came in and got silly with it. I thought the album was fine. Killer vocals but without anything particularly memorable. Now, that foundational one-LP band has come back for another record 25 years after kicking the habit on (who else could it possibly be?) Relapse records. I bought Near-Death Travel Services, along with Double Infinity by Big Thief and a used copy of Red Yellow Blue by Born Ruffians, at Tunes in Hoboken with my sister.
Perhaps the biggest complaint that I've heard about Near-Death Travel Services is that it sounds too much like the old stuff. I know for a fact that these same people would complain even louder if it deviated even an inch more from the sound of Fixation on a Coworker and Work Ethic than it already does. That's the trap that every reuniting band falls into. Does Near-Death Travel Services sound like the old stuff? It sounds like the old stuff but better. The riffs and song structures on the album have gotten a little simpler, a little punchier, more rooted in classic thrash. The influence of Slayer in particular can be clearly heard on the fast sections of “Barn Burner” and “War With Strangers”, all throughout “All Stick & No Carrot”. That’s not to say that Deadguy have suddenly added guitar solos and high shrieks to their repertoire over the past 25 years. This is still metalcore. Big, groovy sections like the breakdown of “Wax Princess” swing like the head of a flail. Even when they’re taking it slow, Deadguy are strung tight, threatening to combust from sheer tension.
Tim Singer's vocals are the highlight of this record, just as they were the first one, and the lyrical content here is much more positive-hardcore than Fixation on a Coworker. “We are the freaks and we dare to believe/there is a place for us in this world,” he screams on “Kill Fee” to open the album. He then deliberately undercuts any possible saviour narrative on “Barn Burner” by singing about how feeling uncomfortable about homeless people causes him to doubt the strength of his other convictions. “My New Best Friend” is about drugs, “The Forever People” about fascists, “War With Strangers” about the reasons we have fascists. I think there are a few moments on this record, like the Siri outro on “Wax Princess”, where the band’s reach exceeds their grasp. “The Alarmist” and “The Long Search For Perfect Timing” didn’t really make that much of an impression on me. I’m a much bigger fan of the first half of the record overall, and I think the album is stronger for having reduced the sckronk and math elements in their sound without eliminating them entirely.