Dredg

Catch Without Arms

By Scott Brennan        

           WARNING:  People prone to suffering from the overwhelming presence of catchy rock choruses that interfere with classes, meetings, family interaction, and work should NOT read any further.  

Via the overstocked, over redundant, and over used “information super highway” I stumbled across Interscope’s latest group of unknown rockers, Dredg.  Their latest album, Catch Without Arms, serves up the most surprising, refreshing rock music of the year.

The band’s follow up to 2002’s release El Cielo, shows the maturity Deftones’ producer Terry Date captured from longtime friends and Californian natives, Gavin Hayes, Mark Engles, Drew Roulette, and Dino Campanella.  Dredg’s third concept album release deals with rejecting and confronting ideas.  The album demonstrates this through two separate halves, meant to show contrasting imagery. 

After only a few listens, I already started threatening to bypass cars on the Parkway as I swerved due to my uncontrollable, Dredg inspired steering wheel drumming fiasco.  Musically, Catch Without Arms marks a subtle change towards a simpler and more direct song structure for Dredg.   With the experimental drive of El Cielo and Leitmotif  in the band’s rearview mirror, Dredg has yet again recreated themselves by not only holding up to the intricacy heard on past albums, but at the same time, offers the band’s most vocally driven, gritty, radio friendly album to date.  Dredg vocalist Gavin Hayes’s voice raises comparisons with Chino Moreno’s dirty subtlety, Darryl Palumbo’s soulful banter, and Bono’s extensive range, creating an almost spiritual and operatic sermon for all who listen.  The instrumentation on the record resembles a bizarre yet lovely eclectic mess of The Mars Volta’s staccato guitars and Incubus’s tight rhythm section.  The album’s standout masterpieces lie vividly on the first two tracks, “Ode to the Sun” and “Bug Eyes”.

As Dredg pushes forward, music fans and critics continue to find it difficult to place Dredg amongst any one of music’s vast amounts of created genres.   With a sound that certainly has a style of its own, the band remains engulfed in a mysterious cloud that has everyone from tattooed head bangers to 94-pound emo kids showing worlds of interest in the West Coast foursome.   With past albums based on concepts such as a story about “spiritual disease” and the interpretations a Salvador Dali painting, Dredg has yet again planted a new seed of intrigue among fans, both old and new.