Dead is Dead play Frank’s Power Plant on Friday, Oct. 21 with The Mons, Volunteer and Doubletruck.
Mark Sheppard admits that his first experience in a real band sort of spoiled him. Around the turn of the century, Mark and his brother Nick made up half of the fondly remembered post-hardcore quartet Forstella Ford, a group that played hundreds of shows and toured Europe at a time when few Milwaukee bands were doing all that much outside of the city. And then, around the mid-’00s, the band called it quits for reasons that seem pretty silly in hindsight.
“At the time we just thought we were getting pretty old,” Mark says. “We were 24 and just sort of thought the band was expensive; we should just think about getting real jobs. We just kind of got burned out. Of course we realize now at 38 that 24 isn’t old at all.”
Mark says he spent the better part of a decade trying to get another band together with his brother, though it was hard to find the right people, and after the relative success Forstella Ford, most of their options didn’t seem all that appealing. Mark went on to play in a pair of heavy local bands—Stock Options and Volunteer—but it was only after his brother and he linked up with singer-guitarist Eric Madl that he found an outlet for some of the musical ideas that him and Nick had been kicking around together.
The trio bonded over a love of metal—specifically metal’s shoegaze-inspired offshoot post-metal—and bands like Neurosis and Cult of Luna. The three run with it in their new band, Dead is Dead. Last month, they released their debut album, Constraints of Time, a suite of six frequently gloomy but periodically beautiful dirges about a world gone to hell, including several epics that stretch past the seven-minute mark. It’s heavy enough to thrill metal diehards, but like Deafheaven, it’s dynamic and melodic enough to play outside of the usual metal circles, too.
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Madl says the band tries to avoid overt politics, but that he couldn’t help but write about the way a lot of us feel in 2017.
“I write a lot about anxiety and depression, so it’s a catharsis for me to try and get it all out,” he says. “But some of it was post-election blues, too, just coming to terms with what’s happened. For me, I listen to NPR all day long, so I get the same newscast read at me three different times, and it just hammers home certain things about humanity constantly. You’ve got to get it out.”
The album came out only a few weeks ago, but Madl says they’re already at work on another one, which he predicts should expand on the already incredibly intricate, grand-scale compositions of their debut.
“We’ve got one new complete song that we’ve got to revisit,” he says. “It’s like 14-17 minutes depending on how we play it out, so it’s a cumbersome task to revisit that stuff. It’s two distinct parts with multiple movements in between. And we’ve got other material we’ve been working on. We want to do a double LP for the next album, just because it’s an undertaking.”
Also on the band’s to-do list: touring as much as possible, though Mark concedes logistics make it all but impossible for them to play out as much as Forstella Ford did back in the day.
“We are trying to play out as much as we can, it’s [that] we have limitations with our jobs. Also, all three of us drive Honda Civics, so right now we have to rent a van if we want to go and play shows, so we try to time it out so we can play it a couple at a time.” And, while Mark adds that you can fit a surprisingly decent amount of gear into a Honda Civic, he says a sedan doesn’t cut it when you’ve got a drum kit to tote.
“Eric plays through two amps, too, so he’s got quite a bit of gear,” Mark says, “and our bassist had an 8x10, so we really have a lot of gear for a band that doesn’t have a van.”
Dead is Dead play Frank’s Power Plant on Friday, Oct. 21 with The Mons, Volunteer and Doubletruck.
