Dead Moon - "Dead Moon Night"
Dead Moon - "Unknown Passage"

Dead Moon's songs are full of in-between places: twilight zones, graveyards, unknown passages, and mystery zones. Their music occupies a borderland between the past and the present. With hooks from sixties rock n' roll tied to the sonic rawness of punk rock their songs alternate between fist-pumping bangers and heartbreaking ballads. Dead Moon inhabit a place entirely their own, off in a wilderness where few bands have managed to follow.

Their legend is widely known. For almost twenty years between 1987 and 2006 the Clackamas, Oregon band self-recorded, self-mastered, and self-released ten LPs in glorious mono and toured the world's barrooms and beerhalls. Their record covers all bear the band's singular, sometimes spooky, homemade black and white cut and paste aesthetic. Although Fred and Toody were nearly forty by the time they started the band, the group maintained a level of do-it-yourself purity that would put most teen hardcore bands to shame.

But legends get in the way of seeing the real thing, so let's get to it. The Dead Moon songbook is a singular achievement in independent American music. Fred Cole's songs often expose the scars of a lifetime spent as an iconoclast living outside mainstream society. His falsetto voice and tremulous guitar are often heartbreaking. But the flipside of these heavy emotions are the defiant rockers. With Cole's guitar leading the unfuckwithable rhythm section of Toody Cole on bass and Andrew Loomis on drums, the band destroyed and celebrated what life can be when you live by your own rules.

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The Fred and Toody Duo are playing an acoustic set of Dead Moon songs this Friday, June 12th at La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent) in Montreal, as part of the fifteenth edition of Suoni per il Popolo. You can buy tickets here. Fred Cole's health is not what it once was and this is likely the band's final tour before retiring after twenty-five years of on the road. Be there!

[buy Unknown Passage and Crack in the System]

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