As an album in its own right Deaf Arena is a towering monument of distorted terror—brooding and heavy with some beautifully intricate atmospheric meanderings.
An album of vast doomy tracks that walk the line between shoegazy noise drone and bass heavy aggression, all with a heavy lean toward the ambient arena. John Cohen (aka Dead Fader) is quite good at creating music out of abrasive sounds, and this album is no exception. Deaf Arena is an unsettling listen, not to be taken lightly. If I knew someone who had recently split up from their partner, had their house repossessed, lost their job, fallen to drinking heavily in the daytime, and who spent their daylight hours in a bedsit with all visible surfaces painted black and buying up all the paracetamol finances would allow, this would not be the album I would recommend to them. On the other hand, it might be slightly representative of their state of mind, so if I wanted to describe this person to someone else, this might be the album I would choose. No, it’s not really as depressing as I’m suggesting, but it is quite bleak. It really makes me think of the opening scene from Terminator, when the machine tank is driving over the human skulls and the world is a blackened ruin decimated by the war. It’s an image that came to me in the first listen and is now permanently associated with this album. Cheery.
I really don’t know why I’m making all these seemingly negative comparisons, I don’t mean to make it sound dreary because it’s really rather good. It’s brooding and heavy with some beautifully intricate atmospheric meanderings. It is a bit of a deviation from the Dead Fader output, but there are a few parallels to be drawn, especially in the track “Sweet Tester” and to a lesser extent “Watch That Searing Flare.” Actually there are a lot of parallels to be drawn, of course there are, it’s the same guy after all, the heavy use of distortion for one, but the style is very different; less ‘punch you in the face’ and more ‘quietly threaten you with a razor blade stuck to the end of a toothbrush in the toilets’. The first half of “Sweet Tester” makes use of a good old distorted kick drum and a sound that seems to be a distressing cross between a dentist’s drill and brain surgery to create a slow threatening kind of Hip Hop vibe. It’s my favorite on the album, although the second half drones out into the more familiar passive aggressive ambience of the album as a whole.
Although this is a new release, the material is actually five years old now; this is something to bear in mind as the artist was a mere 19 years of age when he wrote it. As he says himself “it would have been a lot more relevant had it been released when it was made”. That aside, this seems like a very mature output for such a young age, the production is big and there are a lot of subtle nuances within the music. It makes sense as a step on the road towards the stuff John currently puts out under the Dead Fader moniker, but it’s maybe unfair to judge the music solely on this premise. As an album in its own right Deaf Arena is a towering monument of distorted terror.
Deaf Area is available on Exotic Pylon.
