ALBUM REVIEW - DEAD MANS COUCH – GLASS HEADSTONES
- Desh Kapur
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
WORDS RICK E
DEAD MAN'S COUCH
GLASS HEADSTONES
There is something quietly disarming about stumbling upon a record that has no interest whatsoever in announcing itself. Glass Headstones, the debut album from Dead Man’s Couch, didn’t arrive with a fanfare, press releases or algorithmic momentum behind it. It organically appeared and well, as a fan of The Dogbones I was extremely excited to see what see which way this release would go.
Dead Man’s Couch comprise of Nomi Leonard and Dave S-B, and, by the sounds of it, a very particular corner of the mind where grief, restlessness and dark humour all occupy the same cramped settee. Nomi handles the primary songwriting on guitar, organ, vocals, and bass; Dave comes in as secondary songwriter and also covers guitars, organ, bass, drums, backing vocals and what is listed as “creative production,” which is an admirably honest credit for the person whose sensibility is quietly holding everything together. This is very much a two-person operation, and the intimacy of the result reflects that completely.
Opening track Run establishes the sonic world of Glass Headstones immediately – guitar that feels slightly frayed at the edges, a rhythm section that pushes rather than plods, Nomi’s voice sitting up front in the mix with no attempt to prettify it. It is the kind of opener that tells you within thirty seconds whether this is a record for you, and I suspect for the right listener the answer will be an immediate yes. There is an urgency to the track that earns its title, a sense of motion and low-grade anxiety that sets the emotional temperature for everything that follows.
The album’s second track Numb is the point at which the Doors comparison really starts to make itself felt. There is an organ presence here that sits underneath the main guitar figure with a real weight to it, giving the track a kind of subterranean quality that I find extremely appealing. The title is not ironic – this is a song that sounds like numbness feels, which is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds. Nomi’s vocal delivery is restrained in exactly the right way throughout, conveying a flatness of affect that is clearly deliberate and clearly controlled. By the time the track resolves, or rather quietly doesn’t resolve, you are well and truly inside the world of the record.
The longest track on the album and, for my money, one of the best things on it. I Don’t Believe has a verse that sits low and coiled, a chorus that opens out just enough to let the light in, a bridge that does something slightly unexpected – and it executes that structure with a real confidence.
Twenty-six seconds, and (radio/fire) earns every one of them. Interstitial tracks on short albums have no business being here unless they genuinely serve the record, and this one does. bracketed, slashed, purposefully ambiguous – tells you as much as you need to know about Dead Man’s Couch’s approach to genre and expectation. Whether it functions as a palette cleanser, a mood reset or simply a breathing space between the first half of the album and the second, it works...
Don’t Be The Reason is the creative and lyrical centrepiece of the record, and the track most likely to pull in a listener who has not previously encountered Dead Man’s Couch. The writing here is operating at a genuinely different level to anything else in this corner of the independent scene.
Brief and bruising in the best possible way. Heather arrives just past the album’s midpoint and functions as a kind of emotional pressure valve, eighty-four seconds of something that feels personal in a way the earlier tracks approach more obliquely. The name of the track carries its own weight without the song needing to explain itself, and to Dead Man’s Couch’s enormous credit it does not try to and then Wallow closes the whole thing, and what a way to go out. The title is a provocation of sorts – an acknowledgement, perhaps even a permission, to do the very thing that the rest of the record has been wrestling with – and the song delivers on it with a kind of grim, relieved satisfaction which brings Glass Headstones to a close in a way that feels both earned and entirely in keeping with everything that preceded it
In a world where independent artists are routinely encouraged to make longer albums to game streaming metrics, there is something genuinely refreshing about a record that simply ends when it has finished saying what it came to say. Glass Headstones is a genuinely compelling introduction, and I look forward to further material.
Caged in a field of melancholy.
5/5
Glass Headstones – FULL TRACK LIST
1. Run
2. Numb
3. I Don’t Believe
4. (radio/fire)
5. Don’t Be The Reason
6. Heather
7. Wallow
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