This is going to be a larger music post, because Dredg is one of my absolute most favorite bands. Most favorite. I really haven't been to that many concerts in my life, but Dredg is one of the few bands I have actually seen live. I've been listening to them since high school. Some of their interviews make it seem like they're a little full of themselves, but then again they're in a band, so that's to be expected.
Their first two CDs are the better ones in my opinion. Leitmotif as a whole is a little heavier than their usual stuff, which still isn't that heavy. According to wikipedia, Leitmotif is about "a man with a "spiritual disease" who must seek out different cultures of the world to find a cure for his affliction." The CD's no longer in print.
El Cielo I think is Dredg's best CD. It's a concept album based around a painting by Salvador Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The painting itself is most likely about Dali's wife's sleep paralysis.
Dredg took it in another direction with Catch Without Arms. Their style became a little more conventional and simpler. Some people like the new direction, some people don't. It's difficult to judge one style as 'better' than the other, because you really can't compare two entirely different things. But I will say I like their older stuff more. Just opinion. Catch Without Arms is also right about the time people started taking notice of them, and Dredg actually started getting a little radio and TV time.
Gavin has said of the album, "The whole underlying basis of the lyrics and the music is opposites, contrasts... I’d written some lyrics that are based around conversations or arguments, so we thought about a record with two halves that contrast each other. The whole basis of the record could be about objection to ideas, and contrast."
Which is understandable. I wrote a paper about Taoism a couple years ago for a class. Taoism is that yin and yang stuff. That symbol on the cover of the album is a variation of a chinese symbol which is closely related to Taoism and the yin-yang (in the original symbol, the circle at the top is a square, and the dot in the middle is a horizontal line). For the life of me, I can't remember what that symbol is called, and google hasn't been able to help me. I only remember it because of that paper.
The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion just came out last month. In all honesty, I'm still not exactly sure what to think of it. It's really good, it's just a little different. It's almost like they tried to mix their simpler Catch Without Arms style with their stranger Leitmotif and El Cielo style. The album is loosely inspired by an essay from Salman Rushdie called "A Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen." The essay argues against hardline religious dogmatism in favor of moralistic and intellectual freedom. You can read it here. It's quite beautiful.
great post
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