“America is a pyramid scheme, and you ain’t at the top”
Few albums slap you awake from the opening line of Dead Pioneers eponymous album is a furnace blast of loud music and Indigenous Americans politics; the debut release from performance artist and vocalist Gregg Deal with his powerhouse band of guitarists Josh Rivera and Abe Brennan, drummer Shane Zweygardt and bass player Lee Tesche. This is a blistering sub-30-minute calling card that leaves you breathless from the sheer landslide of thoughts, concepts, and humour. It’s a furious collage of spoken word, punk swagger and TED Talk which proclaims ‘We Were Punk First’.
Gregg Deal says, “While early punk may not have been talking about us specifically, the overall feeling is the same. But if we are talking about individuality, personal identity, carrying things that are offensive to the popular styles or mores, in what we call the United States of America and Canada? Yeah, we did it first. First Mohawks. First fights. First disenfranchisements.”
One of album’s striking features is how it raises questions as well as raising a smile; ‘Bad Indian’ being the standout example (the video is at the bottom of the article). It deals with “the Euro-swagger” arrogance of people who are “so sure of their place in the universe, their place in the world, their place in the eyes of god” that they impose the usual tropes on indigenous Americans such as the ‘savage’ or the fact that they must have an Indian name like “Red Eagle or Two Rivers”. The song continues, “A woman once asked me my Indian name, and I said, it’s Greg” before a crescendo of indignation with “You speak real good for a Native American, an Indian, a savage, a pagan, a prairie n*gger, a godless heathen”. “prairie n*gger” is bleeped and I wondered if this had been imposed on the artist so I asked the question and got this reply from Gregg Deal:
“The “bleep” stays. While perhaps a distraction in the musical composition and vocal delivery, there is a history with this word that requires a level of acknowledgement and continued existence. While a word used towards me as an Indigenous person of the North American continent, it is not my word to use. It’s use here is to simply illustrate the problematic racial slurs hurled toward me throughout my life, while also being sensitive to the fact that despite the racial intersection of this slur, while real, still did not originate with me or my people. Using someone else’s racial slur, a word that has been used to oppress for hundreds of years, openly and freely without some type of censorship, is simply not my right. While the “bleep” may be undesirable for you, the word itself is even more so for those who have historically been on the receiving end of it.” (See the video for ‘Bad Indian’ at the bottom of this review).
Deal may be the lyricist and mouthpiece but the band wrote the songs together and he says, “We are together in all we do. Our process is one of unity and no ego. Obviously I wouldn’t be here without them. The shared vision is paramount to making this work properly.”
Balancing everything so that the words are not lost in the power of the backing is a difficult tightrope to walk, but it seems second nature to Dead Pioneers. The music is not just responsive but woven in at the atomic level. There’s the feedback and mighty call and response on ‘Tired’, perfect dissonant chords on ‘The Punchline’, exceptional bass and drum syncopation on ‘Rage’, and the gentle propulsion of ‘Bad Indian’, with both ‘Rage’ and ‘Bad Indian’ also giving pyroclastic bursts of punk energy. If Deal is the arc light then the band are the generator keeping his beam burning bright.
With every listen of this short but densely powerful album you get a contact high, a dopamine hit that’s electrically-charged, but when all is said and done it’s the words that stay with you. I nearly peppered the review with quotes but there’s no substitute for the listener hearing most of them for the first time. Dead Pioneers challenges ideals and misconceptions with humour, in-your-face truths and caustic irony such as this section from ‘Political Song’,
“Tiki-torch whites are asking you to pick a side, because everything is black and white and grey areas be damned. Heaven forbid we should share space and resources and ideas, that would be communistic in nature, and I hear that that’s against nature, but three cheers for the train wreck that’s late-stage capitalism, it’s okay if everything dies, just as long as it dies under my boot”
Although Gregg Deal’s “cheekbones aren’t high enough” and his “last name isn’t a sentence”, Dead Pioneers have brought us an instant classic. The first 22 minutes of every school day should be this album played loud while the teacher hands out the lyric sheet.
Dead Pioneers socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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