Meanwhile... In The Midwest

For the past few years, Dead Luke has haunted Madison with a mixture of black-smeared no-wave, psych-rock, and noise freakouts that were predictable in their unpredictability. All those excursions were corralled on Dead Luke’s 2010 LP, American Haircut, a down, discordant listening experience. But that release pointed Dead Luke in a new direction; with a little tweaking, it was easy to see the band as Madison’s answer to the flower-punk of Black Lips and Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Happily, that’s the end result of Dead Luke’s newest, Meanwhile… In The Midwest, an album full of swirling haze, psychedelic meltdowns, and a Bo Diddley cover (“I’m A Man”). Meanwhile… In The Midwest replicates—in spirit—the unique, left-field update of acid rock by those bands, but fractures it through Dead Luke’s stoned-out blues and melancholia.

Meanwhile begins with the tone setting “(Baby) Bring It Home (All The Way),” a tongue-in-cheek homage to blues and its parenthetical song titles. If you’re expecting lyrical clarity here, though, you’ll be disappointed: Dead Luke continues to bury things in a hard-to-penetrate fuzz, where the mood of whatever he’s singing matters, arguably, more than what he’s actually saying. So even when you know he’s clearly spitting some vitriol on “God Of Nothing” (“Don’t give a shit,” is the most decipherable lyric), where that vitriol is directed is hard to decipher.

But that’s not to paint it as a negative: Meanwhile is bad mood music, an album—from the opening crowd noise of “(Baby)” to the 14-minute album highlight and closer “Endless High”—that is sure to find you ready to fight your best friends. It’s an album of impressive swagger and danger, and one that cements Dead Luke’s position as the newest band ready for attention outside of Madison.