Description
Label Review.
2019 album. Rock.
Our Overview.
Detroit-based pop trio Deadbeat Beat are a comprised of longtime friends: Alex Glendening on lead vocals and guitar, Maria Nuccilli on drums and backing vocals and Zak Frieling on bass and now they’re releasing their second full-length album, ‘How Far’. The new album came together in between multiple self-booked tours, including dates with bands like Guided By Voices, Anna Burch, Tacocat, Bodega and Protomartyr.
Deadbeat Beat’s origins date back more than 15 years to a friendship formed in middle school in Grosse Pointe. They’ve been making music together for more than half their lives, initially breaking out on the local music scene with a group called The Decks. Always at shows, hanging out, killing time and absorbing music, Maria Nuccilli and Alex Glendening moved through early projects and various members coming and going before solidifying Deadbeat Beat with the inclusion of bassist Zak Frieling. By that point the band began finding their legs at shows in Detroit and through a series of sporadically self-released demos, EPs and singles as well as an album on both cassette and vinyl.
In a scene of restless loners, everyone’s in at least a couple bands. While Deadbeat Beat actively percolated, Maria’s lockstep drumming kept time for longtime candy-psych heroes Outrageous Cherry and Alex played with trashpunk stalwarts Tyvek and filled in on bass and guitar for Saddle Creek’s Stef Chura and Richard Davies’ recently reformed iteration of The Moles. Even immersed in a wildly creative community Deadbeat Beat stayed on a different path, set apart by complex songwriting that drew from more internal perspectives.
While taking notes on the blacked-out guitar scuzz of their friends and neighbours, there was equal time spent dissecting key records by Kevin Ayers, La Düsseldorf, Joni Mitchell, Julian Cope, The Clean, and a whole litany of rainy pop music. Musically varied and lyrically congruous, ‘How Far’ finds the band at the strongest voicing of this strange nexus, one spawned from rough nights at shitty dive bars as the emotional foundations for soaring pop songs that nervously bump into one another. Largely a reflection on asserting and maintaining a queer identity in an almost completely straight crowd, Glendening’s songs hit at the gut level — either doused in syrup like the harmony-heavy “You Lift Me Up” or stretched into an anxious infinity like “Tree, Grass & Stone,” the album’s extended freak out jam that still feels like a confessional indie pop song.
Their new album was produced by local audio wizard Jeff Else. The new songs were mastered by the singer/songwriter Fred Thomas, who’s revered amid indie-rock circles on a national scale, from his time leading the chamber-pop ensemble Saturday Looks Good To Me.