Three years on from the desolate beauty of their debut, Quindi Records is proud to present the
second album from Dead Bandit. The ghosts of their past endeavours still haunt their guitars, but
on Memory Thirteen the duo's delicately dishevelled Southern gothic feels tonally distinct from their
prior outing.
Dead Bandit is Ellis Swan and James Schimpl - the former a noted solo singer-songwriter from
Chicago with a penchant for eerie, witching hour murder ballads and the latter an accomplished
Canadian multi-instrumentalist with a bias towards heartworn, roaming soundscapes. Their
instrumental collaboration has an open, lyrical quality which says as much as any spoken line, and
on this album they've especially embraced the power of contrast as we're guided between scenes,
sometimes within the confines of one track.
'Peel Me An Orange' is especially instructive in this regard, beginning as a blown-out paean to
sonic degradation and the acute sense of hopelessness it projects, only to yield to a lilting tape
loop of twanging guitar before entirely widening out in an emphatic burst of post-rock optimism.
Post-rock isn't noted for its banal cheeriness as a genre, and Dead Bandit aren't about to lay down
feel-good drive-time anthems, but the sense of pulling at extremes of energy and introspection
show Swan and Schimpl to be testing the emotional limits of their weatherbeaten sound. The
cautiously sentimental mood of 'Blowing Kisses' hints at the hard-won light which can be
encountered while pointedly driving into darkness.
Sometimes noise is a subtle device - a looming bed of unease under the forthright pluck of Swan's
distinct guitar tone or the cracking round the edges of a beaten up drum machine. On 'Memory
Thirteen' the distortion on the bass becomes a central figure in its haggard waltz, while 'Staircase'
and 'Perfume' leave the signal wet until the delay feedback becomes the body of the riff. Either
way, the sound is never left untouched as Swan and Schimpl grow more comfortable in their
exchange, blurring their respective sonic languages as they expand their shared vocabulary to
create an album of depth, difference and devoted distortion.