VWMusic

By Fábio Moniz
fabiorubenmoniz@gmail.com

The COVID-19 pandemic came as a real ordeal for many of us. It came as a killer of many worldly systems formerly taken for granted. With that said, for those who were perhaps thinking, “It could get much better,” boy, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Canadian musician, Dead Hendrix, and San Francisco-based musician, Levi Zadoff, have come together to create an interesting work of storytelling with their new EP, Dead Summer. Its uniqueness is in its reliability; having to live through the lockdown during these long-lasting, and ever-hard times.

If anything, the pandemic has ignited many of our vulnerabilities. Mental health, as a still underrated health issue, is given focus in this great work.

“I can’t take no more.”

It’s been said that in the wake of hard times and challenges we finally see how much it is that we can truly handle, as well as how strong we’ve become. When we look back, all that has passed seems distant, contrary to what we felt when we were living it. Still, we now know that worse can come whenever, right?

But the EP becomes better, deeper.

Entertainingly introspective, the whole EP is a build-up of thoughts about our vulnerabilities, reflecting upon our loneliness, while we, “Don’t even know where I’m at,” and thinking about how the world is changing us. Disease, extreme changes in nature, and by way, changes in our own nature. “Driving through the rain and the snow, I don’t even know when it’s cold,” and these changes only make us the more confused, they affect our insides.

We don’t even know where we’re at.

Many of the duo’s influences can be found in their songs. The addictive sound of Machine Gun Kelly, for instance, is all over, and the nostalgic atmosphere of My Chemical Romance. It sucks us into a world of variety, and we enjoy the surprise. It amuses us, hitting us with a deadly weight when we get back to remembering that our summer has been killed by the virus.

And it will only be killed repeatedly. And these killings “Can’t Be God” at work. They aren’t. They are our own work. We are killing summers, winters, and ourselves, “I don’t wanna die, but if I die right now, I’m fine.”

We are even tidying our beds as we walk, work, speak, and for our readers, as we read this article, but surely, “If I make my bed, I lie in it.” We cannot be God and we cannot control every event in our lives, but we can prepare the beds we are to lie in and wait until tomorrow sheds new light on us.

No heroes.

As in every love game, we are caught up in a turmoil of emotions, and we go crazy. We are only human. As in every event in life, at some point, we have to say goodbye.

What better outro than “Teenage Dirtbag?” It basically summarizes what some of us once were when we were young. Making use not only of those relatable lyrics, for those who had had that teen ages experience; but also to those who hadn’t, but are still able to travel back in time through the specific early 2000s sound. It all comes back to us, and we turn fifteen, eighteen, and twenty, again; only to recall how much better it had been before the pandemic had hit us, and made this world a closed space, with stricter rules and worse quality of life.

Maybe we weren’t ready for this, but we have to thank Dead Hendrix and Levi Zadoff for making these memories a bit easier to go back to and to bear.

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– Fábio Moniz is a columnist for www.vwmusicrocks.com and may be reached at fabiorubenmoniz@gmail.com