The Raw Dents, the second full-length from Chicagoan troupe Dead Rider (previously D Rider), shivers its psychedelic shingles while nightmarish roaches trip rhythmic on exposed nerve-endings. Like a scurvy-ridden Blake Butler scenario, brewing and chewing at chaotic commotion, this is an album suffering up the sinister and sick (queasy does it).
While former US Maple man Todd Rittmann siphons smut-peddling signals from former all-star Americans such as Brainiac, Gastr del Sol and TV On The Radio, he wisely retains plenty of his previous group’s precious scrambled egg theory, generating six-string ciphers to baffle the kernels of song.
Language tumbles out in fractured narrative during over-sexed gutter stalkers such as Mothers Meat and Stop Motion, Rittmann’s voice occasionally worming for a Bowie. And while the whole is in continual peril of tumbling like a fallen fumble, Dead Rider ready their resolve, retching up distinction in the midst of messy process; a cannibalised corpse, manufacturing uniqueness in the distended belly of hybrid swine.
