Dead Meadow

Related Content

• Jane's Addiction Says "Fuck No!" to Shirts, "Fuck Yeah!" to Miami at The Fillmore
  May 19, 2012
• Surfing, Pinball, and Weed: Perry Farrell on His Teen Years in Miami
  May 18, 2012
• Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell Comments on Tom Gabel's Transgender Announcement
  May 16, 2012
• Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Eight Other Undercover Alien Pop Stars
  April 27, 2012
• Jane's Addiction Announce Concert at the Fillmore Miami Beach on May 18
  March 5, 2012

More About

• Jason Simon
• Perry Farrell

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

"I can't tell if we're running from or coming to," singer/guitarist Jason Simon muses on the folky, eulogic "Ain't Got Nothing (To Go Wrong)," his voice dripping with idiosyncratic weariness. He could easily be opening up to a lover, making a statement about the accelerating decline of Western civilization, or summing up his band's lack of genre identity. When Washington, D.C.'s Dead Meadow formed, reverb-saturated stoner metal was on the menu; with 2005's Feathers, a shift was made to reverb-soaked stoner-psychedelic rock. Now Old Growth finds the group dabbling in country, blues, and straight-up rock—Black Mountain sans estrogen, with a bigger gravity bong and more dynamite kind bud. They are fully and finally, it seems, themselves: dipping slurred platitudes and political complaints into open-armed tunes, and as bold as they are inviting. "Between Me and the Ground" takes aim at the Bush administration — "All across this great earth, you cheat and you fight/I bet you sleep easier than I do at night" — while vacillating between lamb-calm and lion-tough. "The Great Deceiver" sports a country-rock gait. Its easygoing, twangy riff crunches and pedal-steel drones move at porch-swing speed as Simon (who, I suspect, idolizes Perry Farrell) spins a sort of blues-trope yarn about a woman who finds Satan everywhere she turns.