When the internet needs a hero… One man will rise… Alright, that’s more than enough pretentiousness for an intro. Hey guys, Acre here. Seeing as how Sir Spittal has not been seen around these neck of the woods in months, I figured I would carry the proverbial torch of talking about obscure bands that no one else likes. This may or may not turn into a weekly thing, depending on how quickly Mr. Wumpus realizes what I’m doing to his beauiful website and throttles me with my own ethernet cable.

Anyways, BANDS!!! I’ve decided to be nice for my first review, and talk about a band who could actually be appreciated by most of you, sorta kinda. dredg (no, that’s not a typo, and yes, that’s a lowercase D) are a band musical snobs and assholes like myself call “art rock”. At their most basic, dredg resemble an alt rock band bestowed with equal parts prog-rock, post-rock, experimental, funk, post-hardcore… Basically any marginally awesome genre under the sun, dredg has absorbed and refined into gems that pepper the band’s four albums. And yet, they remain surprisingly catchy and accessible to people not in “the know” in the music world, while balancing it with enough controlled experimentation to draw in the fringes of the music community. “Bug Eyes”, the lead single from 2005’s Catch Without Arms, is the type of song you could hear on an Alt Rock Top 40 chart, and yet the lead riff is played on a slide guitar, and during the bridge the drummer plays the piano and drums simultaneously.

Besides being fine musicians, you aren’t likely to find a more intelligent, well-read band on any Top 40 list. All four of the band’s albums are concept records, and most are about absolutely bafflingly obscure stuff. Their 2002 magnum opus En Cielo is dually inspired by sleep paralysis and the Salvador Dali painting “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening”. Their latest record, The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion, is based on the Salman Rushdie essay “A Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen”.

dredg is one of the few bands that can tiptoe the line between pretentiousness and accessibility successfully. Their albums are creative, emotional, and often catchy as all hell. If you want to get started with these guys, pick up En Cielo. It’s both their most experimental and most accessible release, and the final track, “The Canyon Behind Her”, is on a short list of favourite songs of all time.

Oh, and Brutal Legend is pretty decent. There, that covers the other things.