Biography
New Jersey outfit Deardarkhead first appeared to surface abruptly through an initial recording, though the trio’s history reached back much further. Guitarist Kevin Harrington, drummer Robert Weiss, and bassist/singer Michael Amper formed the band in 1988, adopting a name drawn from an Irish poem by Sir Samuel Ferguson. Ever since, the members have sustained a steady cycle of performances and releases. Their music openly embraces Anglophilic roots, fusing blissout and shoegaze elements with an earlier strain of post-punk guitar experimentalism to yield, at its strongest, a lush and elegant romanticism.
Running their own imprint, Fertile Crescent, the group first circulated two demo tapes, Greetings from the Infernal Village (1988) and Spiral Down and Vibrate (1991), before issuing the separate CD EPs Melt Away Too Soon (1992) and Ultraviolet (1993). Following a prolonged studio absence, Unlock the Valves of Feeling emerged as their first full-length album in 1998. Performances continued into the 2000s; after Amper departed in 2009 the lineup became an instrumental trio, with Kevin McCauley joining on bass in 2010. In 2011 Captured Tracks gathered the three early-1990s EPs under the title Oceanside: 1991-1993, the second release in the label’s Shoegaze Archives series. Nearly two decades after the preceding project, the instrumental EP Strange Weather appeared on Saint Marie Records in 2016.
Running their own imprint, Fertile Crescent, the group first circulated two demo tapes, Greetings from the Infernal Village (1988) and Spiral Down and Vibrate (1991), before issuing the separate CD EPs Melt Away Too Soon (1992) and Ultraviolet (1993). Following a prolonged studio absence, Unlock the Valves of Feeling emerged as their first full-length album in 1998. Performances continued into the 2000s; after Amper departed in 2009 the lineup became an instrumental trio, with Kevin McCauley joining on bass in 2010. In 2011 Captured Tracks gathered the three early-1990s EPs under the title Oceanside: 1991-1993, the second release in the label’s Shoegaze Archives series. Nearly two decades after the preceding project, the instrumental EP Strange Weather appeared on Saint Marie Records in 2016.
Albums
