Since their formation in 1986, New Zealand trio the Dead C have quietly, steadily built their own uneasy world of noise. The band’s formula changed very little after their inception, recording two guitars, drums, and occasional vocals with simplistic, low-fidelity gear and creating misty, downtrodden emotional landscapes with their sometimes improvised, sometimes structured sounds.
Unknowns fits consistently with the band’s discography, offering a briefer than usual set of insular, shadowy sounds somewhere between billowing clouds of noise and listless, rambling rock songs. Unknowns consists of just five pieces, setting the pace immediately with album opener “Grunt Machine.” The song drifts between phases of delay-heavy guitar feedback and…
…loose, shambling rhythms. Muttered vocals come into the frame for a moment but fade out quickly, with a murky web of guitar tones melting into next song “Still.” Subtle electronic elements, double-tracked vocals and brief percussion sounds join a wall of noise that quickly drops away to just drums and a quiet ambient hum. The dynamic nature of Unknowns recalls the band’s mid-’90s era, with long valleys of calm and pensive, hovering soundscapes similar to moments of classic records like 1995’s The White House. Unknowns clocks in at under half an hour, ending with “The Field,” a tense and building piece that that churns for nearly eight minutes.
While it feels a little slimmer than the Dead C’s usually sprawling statements, Unknowns offers a more compact snapshot of this instance in their ongoing evolution. The core elements of their idiosyncratic noise remain the same, but the atmosphere changes ever so slightly from record to record, with Unknowns finding them in a particularly windswept and fragmentary mode.