L.A. garage rockers The Dead Ships return today with their next Band of The Month session installment, building off last week’s impassioned beauty on “Tomorrow’s Crashes” with another high-energy EP 1 track, “Big Quiet”.
Singer-guitarist Devlin McCluskey and bandmates Alex Moore and Christopher Spindelilus made a strong first impression with their 2012 debut Electric Ahab – which led to a collaboration with Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning, who signed on to produce the band’s guitar-driven EP1.
The mentorship opportunity was a serious motivator and morale boost. In McCluskey’s words, “Getting to work with Brendan Canning on your guitar-driven indie rock is like getting to work with Barry Bonds on your steroid regimen (allegedly).” Gathering steam from their original Studio Wishbone sessions, the band EP II is soon to follow, a companion piece to the first in the EP series, also produced by Canning.
For our September Band of The Month run, Crave hosted The Dead Ships at United Recording in Hollywood, the legendary recording studio complex originally named United Western Recorders and then Ocean Way Recording. An astonishing recording history fills the space, with the original incarnation hosting Frank Sinatra’s entire Reprise recordings sessions, in addition to Elvis, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and countless others. More recently, the complex hosted album sessions for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tool, Rage Against The Machine, The Mars Volta, Weezer and so many more.
Watch below as The Dead Ships filter garage rock through a distorted-serenity, Pixies-gone-pop aesthetic in a song that hits close to home for Devlin – exclusively on Crave:
“For a long time, we were the assholes who prided themselves on playing louder than anyone else,” he explained. “At first we were just going to do one EP, then tragedy struck and my closest friend, Wayne to my Garth, took his own life and it opened up every floodgate. When I came home from the funeral, I read an article about scientists observing a rare solar state called a big quiet, and for a moment it felt as if the entire universe was sitting shiva.”
The Dead Ships’ EP 1 is available through Amazon and iTunes.
Keep up with the band at their official site, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.
