Zebrabook - TDC The Buildings Are Dying

Hear The Track Here

If you haven't already had a frisson of apprehension already at the band's name, then let me add more to the pot. Zip along to the webpage and the first name that will leap out at you is Jon Bushaway and if the TDC in the song title hasn't given the whole game away from the start you will know that we are facing that perennial review challenge: a Dead Company track. There isn't a reviewer alive, I think, that doesn't experience a dizzying plummeting of spirits when faced with one of this bands tracks. Their music is always dense and complex, the tracks are endurance trials often way over ten minutes long - as is this fourteen minute exercise in what The Dead Company is all about. The biggest strike against them though is the hardest, the dark, bitter heart of every single track. If this all sounds like I don't like the band, dead wrong. I have long been a big fan of this very experimental electronica grouping because of the music and - more to the point - the poetry that often studs their work.

Poetry?? Experimental electronica?? Run away!!

This is, in fact, a piece of Dead Company history coming from the extremely disturbing 'Buildings' cycle that shook most of their peers back in 2003 when it first saw the light of day. I know I have a physical copy of the whole project somewhere and I've turned my house upside down looking for it because there is a difference between the original and this new version. Sean Boyle (aka Black Circles) was the original speaker in chief, and in this version is replaced by Soundclick's very own Larry Ludwick who has been doing sterling service with the newer version of TDC. As always, caution is demanded when listening to TDC and as a reviewer I feel duty bound to point out that the earlier version of The Dead Company was considerably more miserable than its present incarnation and The Buildings Are Dying are is but a pale shadow of the beast it was.

Nonetheless, it is the kind of music, lyrical content and overhanging, overwhelming sense of doom, that would drive your average listener to commit suicide within the first minute or so, let alone the other thirteen. Music to irritate your dog by. The dark, suffocating sense has always been the very essence of what The Dead Company has always been about and one of my first clues that things would never be the same for me again. So, early on I formed this bizarre attachment to what they did and this track only bring back to me exactly why I found them so interesting. Whatever you do though, think. You know me, you know I can like some seriously deranged stuff but The Dead Company has always raised the bar for weirdness beyond most people's reach. Oh, and Larry gets to swear, swear a lot and with great viciousness.

MUST HAVE remake for fans. All others exercise EXTREME caution.