Echoes of the Past

Unless you're Ian MacKaye, chances are Dead Moon are a lot more indie than you are, and they've been that way a lot longer than you to boot. Fred Cole and his wife Toody Cole formed Dead Moon with drummer Andrew Loomis in 1987, twenty years after Fred and Toody got married and 23 years after Fred made his first record with the garage band the Lords. As has been Fred Cole's habit since the mid-'70s, Dead Moon produce and engineer their own records, release most of them on their own Tombstone label, and Fred even cuts the vinyl masters himself on an ancient lathe used to make the original lacquers for the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie." While this all makes for a good story, it wouldn't matter much of the band's music wasn't any good, but thankfully that's not the case. Dead Moon play dark, passionate and gloriously primitive rock & roll that fuses the outlaw energy of punk, the aural snarl of classic garage rock, and the desolation of the blues with a lean and moody groove that cuts like a freshly sharpened bowie knife. Dead Moon have been making great records for years, but getting them out into the marketplace has not been their strong suit, and for years the band's profile has been lower than their music deserves outside of their home in the Northwest. Thankfully, Sub Pop has stepped forward to remedy this with Echoes of the Past, a two-CD set that collects two-and-a-half hours of Dead Moon's best music as chosen by Fred Cole himself. Considering that this music was made by people who were in their early forties when the earliest tracks here were cut (except for relatively youthful drummer Loomis, who was born in the early '60s), it's good to report that this band's music actually gets tougher and more focused with the passage of time, and there's just as much fire, rage, and sweat at the end of disc two as there is at the beginning of disc one. And while there's a sharp edge to this music at all times and plenty of emotional and political rabble-rousing in the lyrics, Dead Moon know when to speed up, ease back, or go heavy, giving the music a welcome sense of dynamics and diversity; while these songs may be simple, the band's approach never gets monochromatic, and over the course of 152 minutes that's a truly powerful virtue. Echoes of the Past is as good an introduction to Dead Moon as one could hope for; the lack of any biographical liner notes is the set's only notable drawback, and anyone who wants the skinny on one of America's most indefatigable independent rock bands (or how hard parents and grandparents can rock) needs to have this in their collection.