For anyone seeking out a brand-new alternative act they need look no further than Dead Dads Club, an indie rock band packed with plenty of grungy attitude and raucous talent. On Monday 15 September, Dead Dads Club unleashed their first single ‘Don’t Blame The Son For The Sins Of The Father’—seemingly a teaser for an upcoming debut EP (or even better, an album).
Despite their sudden bursting onto the scene, Dead Dads Club aren’t remotely amateur. Fronted and founded by Chilli Jesson, the London rockers know exactly what they’re doing. Known for his work in the chart-topping indie band Palma Violets, Jesson has had his fair share of being plastered onto front pages of magazines and music columns. During his brief hiatus from the music scene Jesson joined the touring lineup for the Irish alt-rock outfit Fontaines D.C. as a synthesist (a link which proved ideal for Jesson, with the band’s guitarist Carlos O’ Connell producing the track).
Short but sweet, ‘Don’t Blame The Son For The Sins Of The Father’ is loaded with grunge guitars, thudding drums, and rampaging FX, all of which are overlaid by the brilliant vocals of Jesson himself.
The track kicks off straight away with relentless distortion and crashing drums, ‘Don’t Blame The Son For The Sins Of The Father’ makes a statement before it even truly begins: that the band aren’t here to mess about, they’re here to make some noise.
The intensity of the intro suddenly cuts into Jesson’s vocals, where he begins to confess to how he “just can’t seem to get it right, just end up in a fight.” Seemingly in reference to an affair of sorts, he begins then to admit how “she won’t breathe the air I breathe in / she just thinks I am a heathen,” before the track crashes into the distorted instrumentation of the intro once again.
The bluntness and brutality of the lyrics is one of the key features that makes this track what it is. With witty lyricism, Dead Dads Club retains all of the charisma and cockiness of a 2010s alt-rock band while tying in gut-wrenching emotion and exposing themselves completely. This is only right, as the track comes from a dark place itself—with Jesson admitting via the band’s description on Spotify that the track is an exploration of his fractured emotional state following the passing of his father.
Exploring the impulsivity of human nature, the song comments constantly on recklessness and self-destructive behaviour, almost reflecting on the constant cycle of the behaviour itself. As the title of the track suggests, the narrative here is the committing of impulsive ‘Sins’: theft, destruction, impulsive and constant recklessness, and having to come to terms with the consequences of these actions.
The last verse of the track emphasises this aspect the most, with stripping the instruments back to the bare-bones as the narrative snaps back into reality and faces the consequences of its actions: that all this damage has only earned him to be “phase(d) out of the picture” and to have “nothing else left to give.” Realising this, the band clatter back into their original racket, and the cycle repeats.
A brilliant track in both narrative and musicianship, ‘Don’t Blame The Son For The Sins Of The Father’ has undoubtedly kicked off Dead Dads Club with nothing short of a bang. It is only a matter of time before the group becomes an alt-rock sensation, and rightly so.
Words by George Connell
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