A Day Without The Storm from Andrew Deadman's debut solo album "Santa Monica Airport 1987" opens with a big splash of western rock guitar and tom toms. It is immediately stirring and cool like someone flicking a spent cigarette after revealing their own truth to someone even though it costs them something big, their car, their livelihood. Once the heavy bass and beat pound and the guitar cuts cool licks (and a decisive harmonic) Andrew Deadman's evocative battle worn vox pour out. It is gritty, chilly, feels steeped in life and learning from fucking hard times. The eruptions of guitar between his intimate reflections, his stories are so big like crashing waves or cars. The sort of roots rock drenched in porch punk and classic Springsteen-esque blue collar sweat is so amazingly rich and commanding as are the pervasively heavy guitar licks throughout. A fucking cool track.
Other track like Jean Paul Belmondo and The Cold Hard Light of The Sober rides waves that feels a bit like 70's wide cast rock still telling stories you want to hear with Deadman's vocal aesthetic that as storyteller is so engaging. Run With The Hunted feels cinematic drenched in romance like a tear jerker by Bryan Adams and the piano based Driver, similarly, casts movie imagery in a glorious way. Prey For Rain with it's riding on the rails wanderlust tones, pearly guitars and country quick cadence oversteps genres in a multitude of ways and Sometimes The Dogs Don't Find You is a time shifting, big vast, runaway anthem that casts a huge impressive shadow.
On Silent Scream amid piano downbeats, and double time guitar Andrew Deadman with a voice that is torn and bruised sings,
"there's a stone black shadow that's crawling on the walls in this old room I call home for the night and at 4 in the morning I watch that shadow forming from what's left from the cold light"
The song tells tales about lost souls, dreams broken and realized in such a beautiful way. The production is moving with a sinewy yet pretty guitar lick that glues all the intimate tales together. Silent Scream might be the standout on "Santa Monica Airport 1987" - a moving opera that might make you reflect on your own life in the quiet of the night.
Side notes: On the record, Deadman is joined by his longtime drummer and collaborator, Kevin Day, along with Ben Stone on bass.
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Robb Donker
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
Andrew Deadman | About
“I grew up dreaming of making albums not streams,” says Los Angeles-based songwriter Andrew Deadman. “I miss songs and I tried to write an album’s worth of em.”
Deadman’s debut solo album Santa Monica Airport 1987 is the eclectic and electric album he set out to make. The songs brim with an inescapable energy and crunch that is often absent in today’s barrage of cut and run singles that sometimes come up short in the passion department.
“I wrote and produced the songs on this record hoping they don’t belong in any time or era,” Deadman claims, and the album plays that way. The instinct to plop the needle down on any of these cuts doesn’t invoke the fashion of the day, it calls back to more authentic days gone by. Days that saw Deadman dropping out of school at 17-years-old to realize dreams, not streams.
Traveling the world, sleeping on benches and busking for change, by 20-years-old, Deadman drifted to Los Angeles, taking up odd jobs to support himself while writing and recording in a home studio that he assembled piece by piece over time.
Eventually, Deadman would release several self-produced records under the name The Temporary Thing, and like his own years of drifting, would eventually find their way overseas to the playlists of John Peel. Opportunities presented themselves, and soon Deadman’s bedroom creations were being heard on television shows such as “The New Girl,” “Love,” “Gossip Girl,” “Togetherness,” “Community,” and many others.
The fame comes before the fortune, and although Deadman was moving his music now, he was also continuing to move pianos – a different kind of music business – and a trade he was taught by his father.
Deadman developed a reputation in Los Angeles for not only his piano moving, but his ability to move giant vintage recording consoles and priceless gear. Through these jobs, he worked with Keifer Sutherland and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s band The Heartbreakers, among others.
Dreams are often subject to reality, and after breaking his hand on a job, the sidelined Deadman was relegated to driving. Through it all, he never gave up on his own musical road, and when he found himself giving guitarist Davey Catching (Eagles of Death Metal, Queens of The Stone Age) a ride from Los Angeles to his studio in Joshua Tree, a new lane emerged.
A gracious discount from Catching allowed Deadman to record Santa Monica Airport 1987, and for you to hear it. On the record, Deadman is joined by his longtime drummer and collaborator, Kevin Day, along with Ben Stone on bass.
Santa Monica Airport 1987, featuring the singles “A Day Without The Storm,” “Sometimes The Dogs Don’t Find You,” and “Silent Scream,” is out now via Chicago’s Minty Fresh Records.
Deadman realized the dream, so compromised on the stream.
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