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Dead To Me - African Elephants

Rating

RIYL

The Clash
Dillenger Four
NOFX

Release Date

11/10/2009

Label

Fat Wreck Chords

Tracklist

1.X
2: Modern Muse
3: Nuthin Runnin Through My Brain
4: A Day Without a War
5: Bad Friends
6: Liebe Liese
7: Cruel World
8: Three Chord Strut
9: California Sun
10: Fell Right In
11: I Dare You
12: Tierra del Fuego
13: Blue

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Recent Ratings
Bukkakeface

Dead To Me was always one of those bands whose name I had heard thrown around a lot but had never actually gotten around to hearing. After doing some research and seeing that they are a well-respected band with a fairly rabid fan base, I was excited to listen to their newest and third full-length, African Elephants. I decided to not listen to any of their other material, hoping that going in cold would give me an unexpected treat. Instead, I got one of the laziest, faceless, and most unremarkable albums I’d heard in a long time.

The problems don’t begin with the first song “X”, and with a good reason: it is one of the few songs on the album where the band experiments with genres. The opener is a straight-up dub song with upstroked guitars and a groovy rhythm section. The vocals don’t do much for the song, but that doesn’t stop it from inducing some serious head nodding. “A Day Without a War” begins with one of the best The Clash riffs you’ve ever heard, complete with reggae influenced guitar work and upbeat, simple drums. Dead to Me does a strange Counting Crows type song in the middle of the album called “Cruel World” full of acoustic instrumentation and a surprisingly sunny disposition. The oddest song on the album, “California Sun” is also the best, with the band’s take on Vampire Weekend and Calypso. The song has enough giddy, upbeat guitars and groovy bass lines to make me feel like I’m laying on a beach somewhere.

But these decent songs (which are actually more enjoyable in concept than in execution) are rare on this album. The rest of the tracks are the kind of middle-of-the-road mid-tempo punk that makes sure you have to work hard to not hit the skip button. Many of them peddle the sort of basic three chords, simple drums, and no discernable melody approach that The Ramones did much better in their day. For most of the album the band sounds like they are just going through the motions, and the vocals are the biggest culprit in this crime. They more often than not just ramble along without any real direction or identity, very rarely creating anything that will stick in your head longer than the duration of the song. The guitars never do anything interesting or unique, even delving into the decidedly bad with the rock’n’roll influenced “Liebe Liese”, and the drums mostly just exist without any real redeeming qualities. The lack of skill in the songwriting rears its head in its worst form when the songs reach their end, as most of them just stop suddenly without carving out any true definition or identity. The songs often end in a manner akin to me writing a sentence and deciding to end because there.

I understand that Dead To Me recently lost their founding member and chief songwriter, and while this is an understandable reason for having such a blasé album, there is no excuse for a band releasing an album of subpar material when they clearly weren’t ready to release anything at all. If more attention was paid to the songwriting and development of this album without their fourth member, there was a chance that this could have been a fun listen. Instead, the most apt review I can make after giving African Elephants numerous chances is this: Move along folks – nothing to see here.

--Stephen Harris