You just gotta love bands that can cover alot of ground and Dead Sea Apes is certainly one of those bands. Far removed from the desert trips on “Nightlands”, Live at Belper, with Adam Stone on vocals captures them in their rawest form, capturing what could be the soundtrack to some dystopian nightmare.
Limited to 150 copies, on Cardinal Fuzz’s sister label Perfect Prescriptions. Serving as a fund raiser for the Ottawa Fund, Live at Belper captures the artists in a 40 minute set of punk, spoken word, multi media and and fuzzed out dub romps.
We start off with two somewhat punk tracks that recall the political musings of the Dead Kennedys, Saccharine Trust or Boston’s The Proletariat. Then we start to enter a different phase of the performance where we get a bit of spoken word on on “Public Service Announcement” with an uplifting message about nuclear annihilation.
What could be more appropriate for these very times now than the track “Retreat To Your Bunker”. Retreat takes us to where we will remain for pretty much the rest of the performance. Somewhere between The Fall and Public Image we are treated to a funky mixture of pulsing bass lines reminiscent of Jah Wobble’s playing with PIL and the vocal angst in one might expect from Mark E. Smith. The set closes out with a much heavier Yes/No. From reports of this evening it certainly seems like it was a special gig in a perfect environment for such a performance.
