Audiopile Review: Just the other day, we had the honour of being messaged by London’s imposingly cool World of Echo record shop. The message read: “M8, we’re blasting The Dead C’s 1992 noise rock classic ‘Harsh 70s Reality’ and it sounds mint. Also, there’s a bloke in here buying a Subway Sect single who claims to know you.” (Admit it, The Dead C make exactly the type of captivatingly alien racket you want to hear when you walk into an imposingly cool record store.) “Yeah”, we replied, “The sidelong opening, ‘Driver U.F.O.’, is the New Zealand legends at their most face-melting, and no mistake, guvnor”. (Can’t really do the accent but, you know, when in Rome and all that.) Anyway, we continued: “And then you’ve still got three sides of trash-punk bottle rockets and obliquely evocative lo-fi sound sketches, M8.” Apparently, the Subway Sect bloke also claimed to have an original copy of ‘Harsh 70s Reality’, but we suspect it was the previous reissue, from 2012. In any case, it’s great to see this essential avant rock classic back in print, and no mistake, guvnor.

Editor’s note: The ‘writer’ who did this review is lying. We received no such communication. And we’re pretty sure he’s the ‘Subway Sect bloke’ because we haven’t seen him in weeks and he keeps texting us at weird hours.

Originally seeing the light of day in April of 1992, Harsh 70s Reality was not just a high water mark for that year, but for the ages. Technically this was the band’s fourth long-play outing, and as a double-album, it followed (and was ever so slightly informed by) two formidable juggernauts that preceeded it: Twin Infinitives and Lake. But it was Harsh 70s Reality that left the decade stronger and more resonant than it came in.
People say that rock music died with the passing of Kurt Cobain. But The Dead C slaughtered it in its sleep with this tremendous set of grinding thud. It is in every sense the ultimate post-rock album. To hear it is to understand why one scribe back in the day referred to their sound as “a garbage truck backing over the abyss.”