“There’s screamers that I trust, and there’s screamers I don’t trust, you know what I mean?”
This is Deadguy vocalist Tim Singer weighing in on the vocalists that have hit him the hardest over the years. Some are hardcore icons, like Suicidal Tendencies’ Mike Muir or Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye. While speaking with Revolver, he also brings up his love of PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple and the members of N.W.A. Even if they’re not all screeching at the top of their lungs, the throughline, he suggests, is that he’s drawn to vocalists that possess a raw and emotions-wrecked approach reflective of an undeniable inner fury. Anything else just seems suspicious.
“I don’t trust Dave Grohl — I can tell [he’s a] happy person [who] loves his mom,” he continues, referring to the Foo Fighers leader and “nicest guy in rock.” “But Nirvana? Kurt [Cobain] could be doing something melodic, [but] there was a tragedy up there on-stage that I could get my arms around and relate to. That’s what I look for in music: that shared anguish. It glues us together.”
As for Deadguy — the cult noisecore group he formed in the early Nineties — it’s fair to say that they’re back and they’re pissed. You can hear it in Singer’s explosive voice.
Throughout the band’s Near-Death Travel Services — the New Jersey quintet’s first studio release since 1996, and likewise their first with Singer on the mic since 1995’s landmark Fixation on a Co-Worker LP — the Deadguy vocalist puts on a furious clinic while seething over the state of the world. Whether he’s scarlet-rage hollering about divisionary culture wars or largescale intolerance, songs like “Kill Fee” or “War With Strangers” reflect an inner monologue he says is still “heavy and depressing” after all these years.
“‘Kill Fee is literally [about] what I felt like the day after Trump got reelected. I felt like the world just said, ‘Fuck empathy,’” he recalls. “It’s not about Donald Trump, because I never want [someone] like that renting space in my head every time I sing a song. It’s more like, ‘Wow, I live in a world where it seems like [there’s] no empathy. Like, ‘Fuck everybody. Fuck trans people. Fuck gay people. Fuck immigrants.’ It’s like we said ‘Fuck you’ to all those people, collectively.”
Near-Death Travel Services, in a sense, is a way for Singer to release his pent-up frustration over these kinds of issues. That’s been a constant across 35 years of vocal intensity: from Singer’s early work with hardcore act No Escape, up to his time with Deadguy, then onto records with Kiss It Goodbye and Bitter Branches, and back with Deadguy when the act reunited in 2021.
But while Singer and Deadguy guitarist-vocalist Chris “Crispy” Corvino put some seriously incendiary screams onto Near-Death Travel Services, the record’s most disturbing vocal spot may be the eerily calm, yet thematically unhinged rant Apple’s AI assistant Siri delivers on grand finale “Wax Princess.”
A lean, aggressive mosh scores the computer voice discussing the futility of time, ill-fitting suits, human duplicity and more — all of this channeling unsettling thoughts Singer had been cataloging into an epic iPhone note.
“I’ve got this ongoing file with nothing but phrases — [they] come across dystopian most of the time. Like ‘I’m as useless as a prayer’ or something like that,” Singer notes, adding that he accidentally cooked up Deadguy’s Siri collab while sitting in traffic on the way to the recording studio.
“I go, ‘Hey, Siri, read my note to me,’ and it goes on for, like, four-and-a-half minutes. It’s starting to crack me up, because it sounds like Siri’s got some real problems — it’s like it’s observing the end of the world, or something. So, then I got to the studio and I played it for [producer] Steve Evetts, and he’s like, ‘That’s brilliant. We gotta use it somewhere.’ Then we recorded it from my phone into whatever trickery he has.”
He continues: “I just thought that made sense for us, that this pleasant voice would be telling you all these terrible things. I love it!”
Nathaniel Shannon
With Deadguy back in the saddle with a fuming new LP, Singer spoke with Revolver on the six scream-heavy vocalists that helped him shape his own special kind of rage. And he added a personal disclaimer: “The people that make my Mount Rushmore — first of all, I’ve seen all of them live, right? So, there’s an authenticity there that I know is legit, because there’s nothing like the feeling of going to see a band live. There’s no studio trickery.”
Zack de la Rocha – Inside Out, Rage Against the Machine
Zach is just such a great frontman, and a great lyricist. I liked Inside Out, which was his hardcore band, but in Rage Against the Machine he just does some shit. From the ranty thing, to hip-hop, down into fully belligerent screams and then back again. I don’t think he’s ever done anything bad. He’s flawless.
It’s funny… I don’t really have any super metal guys on here. That’s not really the world I come from. I love a lot of that stuff — I love the brutality of certain bands — but when you’re talking about specific singers, I want to understand every word.
Ian MacKaye – Minor Threat, Fugazi
Not so much in Fugazi, but in Minor Threat. [Ian MacKaye] was a huge influence on me, in terms of how he sometimes just talks over a song and then screams over it. He tells a story. And he doesn’t sound like anybody else — when you hear Ian MacKaye, you know it. Actually, I would say that about all the guys that I’ve put on this.
Minor Threat’s one of the bands that literally [made me] want to do a band, you know. And I feel like his stuff… he would just talk over songs and be like, “What the fuck have you done?” [from the “In My Eyes” break] My wife has pointed out to me how she hears that in my vocals. Or even Mike Muir on “Institutionalized” — like, “All I wanted was a Pepsi,” and then it builds into a scream. All that stuff just made it into my DNA.
John Brannon – Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas
I love Negative Approach but I never saw the 1.0 of that band. But Laughing Hyenas? The vocals are just so sick. There’s a melody to them somehow, and you can understand every word. It’s like he’s dragging you through broken glass… He’s just so good.
I’ve seen him live where he would stumble onto the stage. He’s one of those people [where] you could prop him up and push him onto the stage out of any given stupor, and he’d still deliver. He’s just made to do this. If anybody wasn’t aware, that band [Laughing Hyenas] does not get enough flowers.
[The first time I saw Laughing Hyenas] was at [Hoboken, New Jersey’s] Maxwell’s. It’s a really tiny club. There might have been a hundred people. I just remember being a little afraid to go talk to them. I’m pretty sure they were drunk or on something else.
There was no fanfare. They would just walk up, plug in, and the song starts. There’s no warming up the audience or talking to anybody. They just walked out and bam! I love shit like that. We used to do that in Kiss It Goodbye [Singer’s post-Deadguy band from 1996-98]. We would just walk up there and play “Helvetica” out of nowhere, and not [even] wait for people to come in. Like, “We’re here!”
So that was a big thing I took away from [Laughing Hyenas]. And they had a sound that’s not your typical heavy sound, right? It’s more Birthday Party than hardcore or metal. That opened up my mind… like, “What are other ways to make shit heavy?”
Henry Rollins – Black Flag, Rollins Band
Rollins was just pure, unfiltered, muscular rage. We were all worshipping Rollins a little too much back then, I think…[but] he was like the [total] package. He looked like fucking G.I. Joe with tattoos. Even his tattoos were scary.
And he was just screaming these heavy kinds of blues songs. [The first time] I saw Rollins Band might have been ’87 — Black Flag wasn’t even broken up for a year yet. It was Rollins Band’s first tour. It was a small club in South Jersey. There might have been 20 of us there. So, here’s a guy who had been in Black Flag and toured the world — played huge shows — and now he’s in a small club in Margate playing to a bunch of drunk, stupid kids… and [he] just destroyed us! They were so heavy and tight, and he was so unaffected by the lack of [a] crowd. He was undeniable, [Rollins Band were] a heavy machine. I wasn’t even in bands yet, but that always stuck with me.
His voice and lyrics on [1987’s] Life Time and [1989’s] Hard Volume are just fucking great. And I had [Rollins’ Black Flag tour diaries/autobiography] Get in the Van just like any other self-respecting, early-twenties hardcore guy. [That was] a peek behind the curtain into his process and mindset… That book [was] a manual on how to approach [being in a band].
David Yow – Scratch Acid, The Jesus Lizard
Jesus Lizard was the last show I saw before COVID, and he was still as dangerous as ever. Truly, you don’t know what he’s gonna do or who he’s gonna do it to. He seems unfettered by any notion that something might harm him. And he’s not some big, tough guy — he seems just fearless. So that’s a draw.
And his vocal approach… he’s the master of his lane, and I think he’s really the only one in it. The way he lays vocals over shit is something you would never think to do, necessarily. Somehow, it’s even catchy half the time. I don’t know how people don’t like these Jesus Lizard — they’re one of the best things of all time.
I’ve seen them a bunch of times, and I’ve never seen him disappoint. [David Yow has] also shown how you can keep doing this crazy shit [as you get older]. He’s probably in his sixties now, and he’s paving the way for people like me.
I bought the Goat cassette off Charles [Maggio] from Rorschach at a record store in New York City — he told me to buy it. And it did unlock this place [for me] where you can just kind of go a little crazy [as a vocalist]. Like, you can go crazy over shit as long as you know how to land. I took a lot of that from David Yow.
Guy Picciotto – Rites of Spring, Fugazi
Guy just sounds like he’s having a breakdown [in Rites of Spring,] but in a beautiful way. His words are so poetic.
Rites of Spring are quote-unquote emo — they broke this idea that you can do a hard sort of punk record on pure emotion. There’s no politics in it, really, unless you say they’re personal politics. They’ve got great lyrics like, “I only want you to realize passivity equals compliance/Let it slip right through your hands, become the victims of other’s demands” [from “By Design”] — lines that are political, if you break them down.
I never got the chance to see them live — but I’ve seen Fugazi a million times, and Guy is just undeniable. There’s nothing self-conscious about his performance — it’s unbridled. That’s what I tap into, too.
It’s sort of like [when I was] in high school — you were [either] listening to Mötley Crüe and a bunch of hair metal, or you’re getting into punk and hardcore. But we all shared Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest. But there’s that fork in the road, and I couldn’t stand the theatrics of all that Eighties metal. All the bullshit — chicks and cars — it should have begun and ended with KISS.