Project Description

THE DEAD DAISIES

 Album Review

‘LIVE AND LOUDER’

Reviewer – Ashley Flockhart

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Here I am at the end of September and I regret not listening to this The Dead Daisies‘ Uk/Europe tour album: Live and Louder. It was released in May earlier this year.

I don’t know what I enjoy about this compilation of 15 past songs glued into one experience. That is 15 songs if you include the vignette of song intros titled Band Intros, which is the 12^th listing in this album.

I’m even proud of its members, who formed this creature of a musical collective, The Dead Daisies in 2012.

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You could play Live and Louder in a childcare centre and I do not believe the children would frown.

Well … the childcare operators would go livid when the singer, John Corabi, declares at the end of the cover of The Beatle’s Helter Skelter: “you’ve been fucking badass … we can do this one or two ways, we can walk off stage, act like little rock stars and jerkoffs and whatever.”

Despite this fun profanity, I suspect that for a large part of this album, it allows patronage for kids who have come through the musical tides of  other rock legends such as ACDC and Linkin Park.

I have an inkling they would smile delightedly and dance, if not timidly, at the band’s grandiose guitar chords and drum beats.

These songs are that warm. Regardless of their sad chief concerns of racism and war, drifting and complex love.

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Then there are the songs that ask you to stomp the ground, letting adults wave their arms like youngsters in a tantrum, temporarily becoming flaneurs  by poking mockery at society through the album’s undercurrents of anarchism.

Forget the macabre connotations that the name The Dead Daisies carry. This oeuvre rumbles with an egalitarianism. Some unseen intention to unite people.

If only I saw them live then it would have been permissible to hug a stranger as Corabi sung that “you gotta be strong, you gotta keep trying,” the penultimate lyric of the chorus from the fourth song; Song and Prayer.

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These songs have only a few guitar solos and rollercoaster rides of electric buzz.

If there is ever a solo with an instrument, for example in the eighth song, Something I said, the guitar solo is intended for you to align your own experiences of crumbling relationships with the sound of the instrument.

It is not for decorative purposes.

The songs ascend to a peak of loudness in each song, staying true to the album’s title.

Only after slowly descending into cleverly paced drum beats and scrappy  guitar strums that make you want to part your arms wide open and embrace life itself, as if you’re making a promise to yourself.

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You can appreciate how devoted they are to teamwork because it’s easy to forget these songs were recorded live.

Whenever the band altogether raise the volumes of their instruments; they raise them like weapons, testifying to the power of keeping striving on through whatever strife we have to deal with after we turn off the music.

They aren’t spitting fiery demands at the crowd for the sake of being on a level of godly rock musicians that howl to get you to raise your hands. There is a genuine quality in Corabi’s voice that is inviting.

Corabi is saying: you helped us get these songs off the ground, “So sing the shit out of this song!”

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Dave Bruce

My nickname is “The Amnplifier”. Why? Because around here my focus is on being a conduit for providing greater outcomes that people come here for. My day to day “work” is living in the moment, and I love helping others concentrate on finding their connection to themselves through their experiences.

Why start a music environment? The truth is I love music, I love writing, and I love life. I work with musicians every day, and I feel certain that I will be until they put me in the ground. I have been managing people in businesses of some sort for over thirty five years so along the way I have developed some “wisdom” from my regular and constant “observations”.

Amnplify your experience. That is what we want you to do here, and if you want to let me know why you do, or don’t, shoot me a message on Facebook.

Hope you enjoy yourself here and find something that hits you somewhere.