Dead Pioneers: Po$t American – Album review

Their name alone is outrageous to some and the new Dead Pioneers album doesn’t let up on its strong message fusing hardcore and post-punk. It is presciently hyper relevant to the reality of the USA right now, 9 months after being recorded, says Nathan Brown.

The debut from Dead Pioneers won me over, and a few others at Louder Than War. This follow up carries on in a similar vein except, to quote reviews editor Wayne AF Carey, it is “Better than the first album!” You know what? Even though you can’t recreate the impact of hearing the rage and passion of Dead Pioneers first time round he’s probably right. While I love the stripped back sound of the debut, this follow up does have more depth to it without losing any of the punch and anger. To quote our Wayne again “Takes me right back to the Hardcore DC days. We need a new Fugazi!” On the Fugazi comment, with songs like Juicy Fruit (Ode to Chief Bromden), the second half of Love Language and Untitled Spoken Word No.2, Dead Pioneers bend strings and build up from a subdued, rhythmic atmospheric ambience to an angry outpouring.

The musicians in the band (guitarists Josh Rivera and Abe Brennan, drummer Shane Zweygardt and bassist Lee Tesche) experiment with post-hardcore soundscapes. As well as Fugazi, you could cite Rage Against The Machine in reference to some of their technical capabilities. Twists and turns of tempo conjure up different moods. Of course there are still bursts of a classic hardcore sound present but the overall sound is heavier and darker. If you like MDC and Circle Jerks then this album should also suit you. While this sounds like they could be genre hopping and incoherent, there is a unifying thread in Gregg Deal’s vocal, which also switches mode between storytelling, stand up and righteous anger – sometimes all three at the same time.

If the words weren’t so targeted then Dead Pioneers wouldn’t matter, they would be “just another band”. And it IS the words that excite me as much as the music. This is not confected rebellion, like so much cliched punk by numbers. The advice “Write about what you know” does the same for Dead Pioneers as it did for Stiff Little Fingers. No pose. No pretence. Gregg Deal is relaying his lived experience as an indigenous American and explaining the systemic way that Native Americans have been persecuted, murdered and their culture destroyed or appropriated. As Gregg asks in the third single from this album, Caucasity, “Why do you believe that an educated Indigenous man is unable to teach, speak truth, and help his people at the same time?”. However, he doesn’t lose the sarcastic humour, without which it can be easy to become bitter and beaten in the face of oppression.

As a whole, the album Po$t American could not be more relevant in the Trumpian States of Amerikkka where ICE are pulling American Citizens and people with Visas off the streets and imprisoning or deporting them, and any notion of levelling up through DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion i.e. fairness for non-whites who face systemic disadvantage) is being scrapped. This is despite the album being recorded in July last year and written the previous February, which means it’s not just Trump. The problems were already there and will be in the future. Now it is amplified and more patently obvious to everyone who cares to look, Dead Pioneers would be well within their rights to say “We told you so”. I had intended just to pull out a few highlight but I just couldn’t decide what to leave out, such is the variety, so here’s a blow by blow tour of a blistering record.

The drums and chanting of A.I.M. give way to an increasingly oppressive distorted electronic thudding. In starting the album with this song Dead Pioneers draw your attention to American Indian Movement (whose song this is). A.I.M. was a radical.grouping of activists who fought for First Nations rights including occupying Alacatraz in the 1970s. A.I.M. activist Leonard Peltier spent 50 years in prison after being framed by the FBI and was only released as one of Biden’s exiting presidential pardons. The FBI and their Cointelpro programme carried on in the tradition of the US Cavalry murdering and criminalising A.I.M. If you want to know more details about this I recommend In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse (Matthiessen) which draws parallels with the earlier book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which documented the attempted genocide of Lakota and other Plains Indians in the 1800s. There will doubtless be other online sources you can check.

Title track Po$t American follows and Gregg’s polemic about whiteness and whitewashing in the USA is backed by a slow rhythmic plod in a nod to Lard with spiralling Dead Kennedys style guitar and a middle eight in the vein of jerky hardcore experts Minutemen. One of the singles from this album, it is reviewed here.

Starting with a blistering guitar, another single follows in My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal. Gregg uses sarcasm and humour in his arsenal to attack and ridicule those stealing and appropriating Native culture (on stolen land), all against a musical backdrop that will please fans of Circle Jerks, MDC and their ilk with a middle section that uses similar technique to Tom Morello on the guitar.

“You know who you are
Culture vultures
You fake ass Indians
Trying to benefit off our cultural wares
Ceremonies
Burning sage
Benevolent cultural appropriation
Honor by stealing?
New Age Settler Colonial thievery
Get your own culture”

Urgent hi-hats and toms introduce Pit Song which is a sub-minute hardcore beauty. 5 songs in and we have another single: The Caucasity. Gregg relays one tale from his experience of public speaking in which an entitled young man challenges him full of Caucasian audiacity rooted in his whiteness. The Caucasity! The soundtrack to this take down is like The Fall overlaid with echoey guitar as if delivered by Paul Fox of The Ruts or East Bay Ray of Dead Kennedys – both superlative guitarists. Full review here.

Mythical Cowboys is thumping and angular making it instantly familiar like you ought to know it. “Fakeass cowboys” John Wayne and Kevin Costner are both in the firing line for a scathing verbal attack but in truth it’s the whole film industry. “Best cowboy that never existed, white narrative gets it twisted. I wanna punch you close fisted, tear down your silver screen of lies.” There’s a clear nod to MDC’s John Wayne was a Nazi in the line “John Wayne plays SS”.

A frantic bass line and thumping drums kick off a neat hardcore number Dead Pioneers. Possibly designed to shock in the spirit of the Sex Pistols, the now discredited “Ten Little Indians” rhyme is co-opted into “One Little, Two Little, Three Little Cheers, Four Little, Five Little Dead Pioneers”. Don’t get all sensitive!! As if to underline the fact this is just punk rock humour, spoken word piece White Whine that follows begins with “I don’t hate white people…Listen, I have white friends, they’re not offended”. What follows is an explanation of the construct of white supremacy and its impact in layman’s terms. To do this in under 2 minutes and still throw in a punch line is no mean feat.

Juicy Fruit (Ode to Chief Bromden) tells the story of the character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It is another rhythmic, eerie number with wailing spiralling guitars that ramps up the tempo for an extended chorus. Dead Pioneers are on the record as saying they believe One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is “one of the most important films in providing some progression of humanizing Native people in cinema”. Another sub-minute rager, STFU points the finger at people whose actions shore up white supremacy before ending on the punchline: Shut The Fuck Up. The spoken word number Bloodletting Carnival, delivered over an ominous tinkling piano, questions how America protects the right to bear arms over the rights of children not to be shot at school.

The spectacular Love Language comes in two halves. In the first half, angular crashing rhythms swap with drop outs and string bending to create space and intensity. Gregg describes toxic masculinity and sexism in a patriarchal society “Your sexism is going to kill us all”. Guest vocalist Ren Aldridge of Petrol Girls gives a recognisable shout of “His patriarchal flag is white” at the intersection of the song and identifying the intersection of racism and sexism. Through the second half, the musical intensity builds as Ren explores male entitlement, how a racialised man killing a woman is deemed to represent all men of his race, how the state calls for more police to protect women when it is the police killing women, then as coloniser uses the protection of women in other parts of the world as a cloak. “Let’s bomb them to protect women. The West protects women”. Her spoken performance has the ire and fire of Eve Libertine of Crass at her most strident. The solution is obvious as the song stops abruptly: “Our best defence is community, none of us are free until we’re all free”.

A subdued moment is provided by the spiritually charged Fire And Ash, a moving tribute to the next generation with acoustic guitar and a simple keyboard rhythm. Back into the thick of it, Working Class Warfare uses crisp guitars, snappy rhythms and a satisfying chug to lay bare the way that the “the rich are getting richer and we are not surprised”. “It’s capitalism you see and it doesn’t work for me…freedom shouldn’t have to have a fee”.

Untitled Spoken Word No.2 has a slow lounge soundtrack to another of Gregg’s spoken word pieces. He’s quite simply telling life how it is, with his usual humour. When he says “Sometimes, just sometimes, the only good pioneer is a dead pioneer”, there it is again. Dead Pioneers know that the band name Dead Pioneers and the phrase Dead Pioneers is powerful, and to some people is offensive. The band are putting themselves in the same position the Sex Pistols stumbled into when Bill Grundy said “Say something outrageous.” They are on the same turf as the Dead Kennedys whose name was a slap in the face of America. “The only good pioneer is a dead pioneer”. What a way to end an album.

Catch Dead Pioneers in the UK and Europe or regret it (dates below)

Catch Iain Key’s interview with Greg Deal here.

Dead Pioneers Links

Ordering details

Website

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Dead Pioneers US tour dates:
24th April – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Florida, US (with Pearl Jam)
26th April – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Florida, US (with Pearl Jam)
29th April – State Farm Arena, Atlanta, US (with Pearl Jam)
1st May – State Farm Arena, Atlanta, US (with Pearl Jam)

UK tour dates:
13th May – Voodoo Daddy’s, Norwich, UK
14th May – Downstairs @ The Dome, London, UK

Reconstruction Tour with Pennywise, Propagandhi, Comeback Kid
16th May – Poble Español, Barcelona, ES
17th May – Carroponte, Milan, IT
18th May – Koplex, Zurich, CH
20th May – Media Center, Ljubljana, SI
21st May – Arena, Vienna, AT
23rd may – Gaswerk, Augsburg, DE
24th May – Berendrecht, Booswegske, BE
25th May – Schlachthof, Wiesbaden, DE
27th May – Live Music Hall, Cologne, DE
28th May – Melkweg, Amsterdam, NL
29th May – Docks, Hamburg, DE
31st May – Zitadelle Spandau, Berlin, DE

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Words by Nathan Brown. You can read more from Nathan on his Louder Than War archive over here.