Review: Dead Meadow ‘Foundlings’

Listening to Foundlings feels like reconnecting with different moments of Dead Meadow’s long musical journey, some familiar, others unexpectedly revealing. This seven-track collection brings together rarities recorded across more than two decades, drawn from different sessions and projects, yet it never feels like a collection of leftovers.

Instead, it opens a window onto another side of a band whose musical identity has always been far more eclectic and adventurous than the stoner-rock tag might suggest. I first discovered Dead Meadow through Shivering King And Others in 2003, and coming back to their music through their compilation of rarities creates an interesting sense of perspective.

The familiar darkness, slow-burning tension and unmistakable psychedelic atmosphere are all here, but these recordings also reveal how freely the band could move beyond their established sound. From experimental psychedelia to heavy, hypnotic stoner rock, their music has always been built around a remarkably close network of influences.

What makes Foundlings fascinating is the way these different recordings now sit together. Some originated from album sessions, while others came from very different circumstances, including No Quarter, originally recorded in 2017 for a Cleopatra Records Led Zeppelin tribute. Taken individually, they are fragments from different points in the band’s history; together, they become a portrait of Dead Meadow‘s restless musical curiosity. And the choice of covers says a great deal about that curiosity.

Their version of No Quarter seems almost tailor-made for them. Led Zeppelin‘s original already possesses that feeling of darkness, isolation and suspended time that the band understand so well. But rather than simply reproducing it, Dead Meadow pull it into their own world. The weight becomes heavier, the atmosphere more shadowy, and the psychedelic dimension more pronounced. It sounds less like a tribute in the conventional sense and more like Dead Meadow temporarily inhabiting a song that already belonged somewhere within their own musical world.

Their interpretation of The Beatles‘ Tomorrow Never Knows is equally revealing. Dating from the 2017 sessions for The Nothing They Need, it appears as a hidden track on the CD edition, almost like a secret waiting for the listener who stays until the end. The original was one of the great experiments of the 1960s, pushing rock music into territory where repetition, texture and studio manipulation became as important as melody. Dead Meadow takes that psychedelic foundation and gives it their own darker, heavier physicality. The distance between The Beatles‘ experimentation and Dead Meadow‘s vision suddenly doesn’t feel so great.

Kingdom Of Heaven, written by Powell St. John (a notable key figure in Austin’s 1960s psychedelic scene, best known for writing songs for the legendary The 13th Floor Elevators) and recorded during the 2010 The Psychedelic Sounds Of The Sonic Cathedral sessions, is another inspired choice. Less immediately familiar, it reveals how far beyond the obvious psychedelic-rock canon their interests extend. They don’t simply reproduce the song; they absorb it and make it part of their own strange, atmospheric universe. The covers aren’t just curiosities between rarities. They help explain Dead Meadow, revealing the musical conversations behind their own songs and showing that their sound was never built from a single influence.

It doesn’t simply fill gaps in their back catalogue; it changes the way you look at it…

From The Children Of Planet Earth is a perfect example of the band’s ability to create atmosphere as much as music. Coming from the 2024 Voyager To Voyager sessions, it carries an added poignancy knowing that these recordings were made during Steve Kille‘s final period with the band. There is something almost cinematic in the way the track unfolds, dark and spacious, as though they are building an environment around the listener.

Opener Everything’s Goin’ On takes us much further back to the 2002 and the Committee To Keep Music Evil sessions that was recorded with Anton Newcombe and Rob Campanella of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Hearing it here makes the passage of time particularly striking, connecting the early Dead Meadow I discovered around the time of Shivering King And Others with the band they would become decades later.

There is movement beneath its restrained surface, and this is another characteristic I have always associated with them: their ability to make slowness feel powerful. There is inevitably a sentimental dimension to hearing these recordings now, but it isn’t simply nostalgia. What I hear is the continuity of a band that has spent years refining a particular musical language while still leaving room for experimentation and discovery. The darkness remains, the psychedelic haze remains, but the shape of that darkness keeps changing.

There is also an unavoidable emotional weight surrounding Foundlings because of Steve Kille, the band’s founding bassist, whose presence was such an important part of Dead Meadow‘s identity. Kille was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer in early 2024, shortly after completing the tracking for Voyager To Voyager and sadly died on 14th April that year. Knowing that he appears throughout these recordings makes the album feel like a final thread running through different stages of the band’s existence, making the album’s title feel increasingly appropriate.

These songs have been recovered from different places and different moments, fragments that have finally found their way back into the story. Yet there is nothing incomplete about them. Even as experiments or detours, they reveal something essential about the band. As I see it, that is the magic of Foundlings. It doesn’t simply fill gaps in their back catalogue; it changes the way you look at it. A Led Zeppelin song becomes darker and more hypnotic. A Beatles experiment becomes heavier and more physical. A Powell St. John composition finds a new home inside a psychedelic haze.

That balance is what has always made them special to me. Their music can begin somewhere almost sentimental, slow and shadowy, then gradually build until it breaks open into something huge, magical and intensely emotional. With Foundlings, it feels like looking through the side door of their history and discovering that even the recordings outside the main narrative have something important to say. These aren’t merely forgotten tracks; they are pieces of the Dead Meadow story that have finally found their place.

Label: Heavy Psych Sounds
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo