DEAD CONFEDERATE: On the Horizon

Although Dead Confederate was beyond flattered when Spoon and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead producer Mike McCarthy offered to produce their debut album, they were taken aback when they flew into Austin and saw his studio.

Although Dead Confederate was beyond flattered when Spoon and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead producer Mike McCarthy offered to produce their debut album, they were taken aback when they flew into Austin and saw his studio.

“We called it ‘The Dump,’” Dead Confederate singer Hardy Morris recalls. “It was Trail of Dead’s rehearsal space, and it was just this little concrete room, nothing glamorous about it. It was barely even a studio. It ended up, though, being the perfect place for us to record.”

The resulting album, Wrecking Ball, sounds just like that studio: raw, isolated and unadorned. And like the studio, it wasn’t at all like what Morris had imagined.

“When I got into the studio, I was thinking, ‘let’s mess with this sound, let’s screw with that, let’s make this part crazy,’” Morris says. “But Mike had a ‘just shut up and play the song’ mentality. I mean, he was very supportive. He told us we were over-thinking it and that we were already better than we thought we were and just needed to put down the songs. So that’s what we did: We had several songs done in one take. It actually really helped my confidence as a songwriter, knowing we didn’t have to bury these songs in reverb and studio effects.”

Founded in the supportive Athens, Ga. music scene, Dead Confederate christened themselves with a name that trumpets their distain for the greasy, boastful music that Southern-rock has become. Although their Southern roots emerge in the twangy squalls of their guitars and in Morris’ mostly disguised accent, Wrecking Ball looks to the North, specifically to the bleak and heavy, rainy-day alt-rock of early ‘90s Seattle. The influence is apparent not only in Morris’ pinched vocals, which seethes with the same bewilderment, hurt and irritation as Kurt Cobain’s, but also in the conflicted, confessional songwriting.

“It’s not that we’re sad all the time,” Morris says of himself and bassist Brantley Senn, with whom he splits songwriting duties, “it’s just that neither of us sit down and write a song just for the sake of writing. Something has to hit me pretty hard for me to write about it, and usually when something affects me strong enough, it’s a negative encounter.”

“In a weird way, although I kind of got Brantley the confidence to try to start writing songs, and try the craft, he became a huge influence on my own songwriting,” Morris continues. “Before, I had been writing songs in that Southern-rock tradition, making up stories or using composite characters, but Brantley started writing these songs that were completely honest, completely un-fabricated. I started trying that, and sure enough, the songs that were more direct were so much better.”

The band’s live shows, including their well-received SXSW spot opening for fellow Athenians R.E.M., who hand selected them, rumble with psychedelic traces of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Dead Meadow, but Wrecking Ball strips that sound down, complementing the band’s direct songwriting with equally direct music. It emphasizes bold, crashing chords and dramatic, overarching movements over frilly, ornate arrangements.