BAND OF THE WEEK: DEAD SEA APES

Contrary to a belief held by no one, having the word “apes” in your band name is no shortcut to the mild honor of “Band of the Week.” However, playing magnificent, towering, impossibly heavy space rock with mystic, meandering and metaphysical overtones is such a shortcut. And by all rights, it should be.

Which brings us to Dead Sea Apes. It bears mention that shortcuts are not something for which these U.K.-based volume visionaries would seem to have the patience. The songs on the debut “Soy Dios” EP – or perhaps more accurately and more unusual, the single song given over to three distinct interpretations that comprise the thirty minute trip – are willed into being by Dead Sea Apes and defined by the slow-build and the careful, nearly telepathic manner in which the band determines when to preserve their power while setting forth with a shimmering, reptilian slither, and when the exact moment arrives to replicate total consciousness-exploding, multi-dimensional rocketry, fueled by the twin engines of distortion and riff.

Download “Soy Dios II” by Dead Sea Apes

But what else (not that we require anything else)? What is it that gives the meditations of these Dead Sea Apes such an undeniable emotional resonance?

Certainly these apes (the apes of revolt) would not be able to define the intangible power of those apes (the apes of dead sea), but there seems to something heavy and pure in band’s seemingly quixotic stated ambition of interpreting the film “El Topo” through an astral amplifier assault.

We’re impressed not only with the band’s ambition but also with how astonishingly close they’ve come to fulfilling it on the first launch.

And when it comes to special guests … the apes have it.

“Each human being has something that I don’t have. If I am receptive and I pay attention, I will notice that everything works together with the objective of obtaining this thing that I don’t possess as a gift in front of me. Each human being is a lesson I must receive … it is important to understand that when I do well by others, I do well by myself. Everything that I do to the others, I do it to myself. And the fact that I communicate with the other without aggression, I receive.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky, “Gospels to Heal”