Review: Dixie’s Death Pool – Scarlet Lake

Growing up in Victoria didn’t have that much to offer as far as shows. Yeah, I know No Means No is from there, but their music was a little brutal and unforgiving for a soft high-schooler like myself. One of my favorite local bands at that time was Dixie’s Death Pool. And I wasn’t the only one; many young bodies would pack themselves in for a near-perfect night of experimental bliss provided by Lee Hutzulak and his mates. I still often listen to DDP’s Beauty Sleep, which I think is an incredible record.

When Lee moved to Vancouver, it felt like the beginning of the end for DDP. I actually played with the band Sunday nights at the Sugar Refinery (R.I.P.) for a short while, and as time went on, Lee strayed further away from melody and harmonic structures, in favor of a more pure experimentation with sound and noise. His subsequent solo releases reflected this as well. Princess Builder, his first solo release, had a lot of really beautiful melodic moments, but those moments were scattered among long stretches of white noise, or noise of some other color. In Lee’s second full length, Angel Trumpets Clicking Death, those melodic moments that I yearned for were even more scarce. Not to say that these records don’t have merit. I know they do. Lee is an amazing musician who has an amazing ability to realize his very distinct musical voice.

Deep down, I’m pretty conservative musically (probably not by many people’s standards); I’m fascinated by noise and sonic experimentation, and enjoy listening to it, but when I think about the music that I come back to, the music that really matters to me, it always has strong melodies and some kind of harmonic progressions (although often obscured).

A couple of weeks ago I received a new Dixie’s Death Pool CD, Scarlet Lake, in the mail, the first under that moniker in almost 10 years. The CD is a fantastic return for DDP. It combines beautiful pop melodies with strange atmospheres. Lee records and mixes on a Roland workstation, and he wields it with prowess and virtuosic ability. Under Lee’s command, the little workstation becomes something of an instrument on its own, obscuring instruments to create unidentifiable sounds. I strongly recommend this CD.