Repent

The more I listen back, the more I think that Repent is the fulcrum of The Dead C’s career. Its title has a double meaning – repenting of their engagement with bigger ‘indie’ labels via manufacturing & distributing deals, and repenting of playing ‘repertoire’ during their 1995 USA tour. Repent, then, is six slabs of The Dead C in all their improvisatory fire and fury; by decisively rejecting the ‘songs’ component of their music, Repent really opens up the possibilities for what The Dead C can do (and release). There’s something particularly brutal about the playing here, and the pieces cleave towards the more mantric, hypnotic side of The Dead C: sometimes it feels like a much more noise-scarred Amon Düül (the hyper-reduced, overloaded version of that group, not the Krautrock prog-dreamer side of things). Almost thirty years on, it’s still an earcleanser of the highest grade.