We first covered Brooklyn indie rock band Dead Painters in June with a premiere of single ‘Fool on Fire’, ahead of the release of their second album, Endless Idle, on Rue Defense. A few months later and the record has been released, and we’re happy to report that it lives up to the potential of the first single.
First, for the unfamiliar, let us (re)introduce the band. “Dead Painters balance a nostalgic sense of sadness with soaring jubilance in a manner reminiscent of Frog,” we wrote in our previous piece, with Oliver Beardsley (percussion), TC Brownell (bass, vocals, keys), Marlene Bowles (guitar) and Japeth Mennes (vocals, guitar, bass) “weaving a harmonious sound across which Mennes’ baritone emerges, pitching somewhere between laconic and loving.” Endless Idle utilises this in order to create vivid representations of contemporary characters, pictures that could be both detailed or impressionistic, depending on your focus.
“I think we all share an interest in writing songs that combine aspects of portraiture (of people we may or may not know personally),” Mennes explains, “along with a dose of autobiography.” The modus operandi is clear on opener ‘Fool on Fire’, with inspiration taken from Hal Hartley’s 1997 movie Henry Fool. As we wrote previously, the song presents “a series of distinct sights and sounds that are interlinked by their presence in the narrator’s experience,” from the opening sunrise to the narrator’s passage through New York City.
‘Not My Overlord’ is a spacious indie rock song, guitar swaying and then squealing between pockets of relative calm, in which Mennes’ vocals gather an insistent tone when delivering lines of defiance (“not going out tonight”, he sings “yeah I would rather stay at home / where nothing will guide my hands into the festering unknown”). The calm, interweaving guitar lines and shuffling drums at the beginning of ‘Output’ call to mind Invitation Songs era Cave Singers, although the song soon builds into something far more urgent than their backwoods folk rock. The vocals don’t appear until the song slows down again, a plodding outro that sounds strangely bummed out when repeating the line “here’s to feeling good all the time”.
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After the meandering ‘New Year’s Day’, things turn dark and epic with ‘We Turned Out’, a shadowy and ominous rocker that opens with off-kilter blare of guitar and a smatter of drums. It has everything that you need in a great indie rock song, both chaotic and catchy, emotionally resonant and a little bit weird, drawing on influences as diverse as Jason Molina and early 2000s indie superstars.
“Past the lights of the town,
lies a terrible darkness,
we don’t know what it is,
we can only guess”
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From this emerges the dawning interlude ‘North Henry’, and the title track is more sedate still, always threatening to accelerate but falling back into wistful languor, with almost Pavement-esque vibes where gaining pace is just too much effort. The album ends with ‘Turn the Lock’ , dreamy guitar skating across the vista as the tone becomes contemplative. The songs serves as a fitting end to a record built from lyrical detail and instrumental craft, a kind of patient testament to songwriting as an evocative force, and one as striking and moving as any formed in the past by long dead painters.
Endless Idle is out now via Rue Defense and you can grab it from the Dead Painters Bandcamp page.
