If I was in charge, I would replace the Pledge of Allegiance with Gregg Deal’s TED Talk ‘Buying corpse tags on E-bay: my work as an Indigenous artist’. I would also make BBC journalists watch it so that they might understand what a genocide is. “Colonialism, racism, misrepresentation, miseducation, apathy – these are the tools of the silent efforts of genocide.”
As well as being the frontman for Dead Pioneers, Deal is known as the Indigenous artist of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. On the band’s superb first single, ‘Bad Indian’, from their eponymous debut album released in 2023, Deal recalls a time when he convinced someone that his real name is ‘Walking Eagle’ – except that “the only time an eagle walks is when it’s too full of shit to fly.” Its rage-laced humour is reminiscent of the captions on the cover of Gang of Four’s Entertainment!: “The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him.” The cover of PO$T AMERICAN is a brilliant inversion of this power dynamic: an Indian is depicted with an axe about to land on a colonialist’s head, and a sign reads: ‘YOU ARE TRESPASSING. IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE ON INDIGENOUS LAND.’
In this country in 1994, the government passed the infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which criminalised ‘repetitive beats’ and created the offence of ‘aggravated trespass’. What is colonialism if it isn’t aggravated trespass? How dare its apologists and beneficiaries turn the commoners into the criminals! Deal, as always, says it much better. On PO$T AMERICAN’s title track (and a GIITTV Track of the Week a couple of months ago) he dives straight in with “Celebrate white independence, it’s great / All the white folks get a clean slate /…A country built on genocide.”
Josh Rivera and Abe Brennan on guitars, Shane Zweygardt on drums, and Algiers guitarist Lee Tesche on bass dutifully kick out the jams, though this collective effort is more than just a seething accompaniment – even without Deal’s majestic, poetic fury, the music conveys a rampant unease. While Rage are an obvious comparison, the shift in tempo towards the end of ‘PO$T AMERICAN’, with its thousand-radio-stations-played-simultaneously-demented-choir effect, is pure …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead.
The album’s first single is the fantastically-named ‘My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal’. Like several tracks on the Manics’ Holy Bible, it’s prefaced with a sneering dialogue sample, then it becomes a Hives-fronted-by-Bill-Hicks take down of ‘culture vultures’. Tracks such as ‘Pit Song’ and ‘Dead Pioneers’ make Black Flag sound as urgent as Bach Bacharach. On‘The Caucasity’, Deal recalls the time a young man interrupted a speech he was giving. ‘Why do you spend so much time complaining and not putting your energy into actually helping your people?’ asked the man, to which Deal rather reasonably replied with the same question. He does ‘historical antidotes, social justice tales, personal lore’, and he cuts to the core, as on ‘Working Class Warfare’: “It’s capitalism you see / And it doesn’t work for me.” On ‘Fire and Ash’, over a simple synth line gorgeously intertwined with plaintive guitar, Deal beautifully articulates hope: “I want you to…walk the world, know you are a light / To hold you, love you, and tell you it will be alright.”
On the morbid monologue ‘Bloodletting Carnival’, Deal says, “I have been a person of periphery my whole life.” If not the enthralling Ted Talks, if not the stunning art exhibitions, then hopefully being frontman for Dead Pioneers will ensure that he is centre stage and stays there. PO$T AMERICAN is our Rage. It’s our Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. We won’t win the war by listening to classic punk albums, but it helps.
PO$T AMERICAN is out now via Hassle Records
UK tour dates:
13th May – Norwich – Voodoo Daddy’s
14th May – London – The Dome (Downstairs)
