Among the bands opening for Girl in a Coma on Friday night at the Echoplex, The Dead Ships made quite an impression on the crowd. The formula duo – guitar and drums – has already been used a lot and reinventing it seems to be quite a task, but The Dead Ships managed to bring something original while evoking big names at the same time.
There was the nervous execution of ‘Amaze’, with fast bouncing drumming and screaming vocals singing the catchy melody over a distorted guitar, that, yes, had something of the Black Keys, but this song was a sort of different compared to their other numbers.
Devlin McCluskey had this close-to-Eddie-Vedder way of shouting his lyrics, either soaring and escaping their garage-rock melodies, or chanting the tunes with many oooh-woahs-oohs, always delivered with a sort of urgency and anxiety. But their minimalistic two-piece approach of music was not preventing them to be loud and aggressive.
Their melodies had definitively strong hooks (just go to their bandcamp page and listen to ‘You were Young’, a song which almost has a 80s sensibility, http://thedeadships.bandcamp.com/album/the-dead-ships-ep) and one song contained of few riffs almost reminiscent of Nirvana.
I have read about a ‘Black Keys meets Best Coast’ comparison to describe their sound, even a White Stripes reference here and there, but during their set at the Echoplex I didn’t get the Best Coast part at all, nor the White Stripes one I read somewhere else, and even the Black Keys reference does not really satisfy me. Their music was kind of raw, visceral and unpolished, but upbeat at the same time, in particular thanks to Devlin McCluskey’s big vocals and Christopher Spindelilus’ fast drumming,
The fairly new duo (they played their first show this year in March) have adopted Los Angeles as their hometown, although they have Midwest (Chicago) and Southern roots (Alabama), and so far they have only released an EP and a 7”, but there is much more coming up from what I have heard.
Both of them seemed so happy to be playing at the Echoplex, Devlin even invited us to hang out with him after the show and said he wanted to buy us a drink. They had this immediate connection with their audience and it is not an easy thing to do in LA where there is a plethora of new bands every week.