(Our site has had a long and warm relationship with the Canadian musician Seb Painchaud, whose year-end lists have always provided eclectic cornucopias of music for all of us to investigate. His band Tumbleweed Dealer released a fascinating new album way back in February of this year, an album that really needed the unusual voice of Vizzah Harri to express a review of it — which at last he has managed to do. It was worth the wait.)
Sometimes if we don’t carefully watch our daily intake of the ‘terribles’ online, it can seem a bit too much Everything Everywhere All At Once (warning, flashing images). It is good to keep oneself updated if any online life or profile exists because outside of our daily intake of horror, two pretty big leaks of personal data happened over the space of about 8 months. The Internet Archive (NPR link) was one, and on Saturday June 21st this one got confirmed too. It’s an AP link, not an attempt to hack you.
You won’t exactly need a machete to hack your way into the shadowy thickets of marshy vegetation when imagining the source material; but Tumbleweed Dealer’s album Dark Green pays tribute to one of the greatest pieces of fiction stemming from the 20th century, Swamp Thing.
Now that I’ve primed your frame of reference with the perils of the internet and mentioned horror at least once, well, Alan Moore is known amongst other things as having been the mind behind the resurgence of said comic book back in 1987. It is available to borrow or buy on the internet archives (it is probably safe by now) and Moore’s introduction to The Saga of the Swamp Thing has some passages that are worth sharing here for still being applicable in today’s climate, and also regarding the record being discussed:
“In a century packed to the bursting point with paradoxes, one of the most puzzling must surely be the meteoric ascent of horror as a genre in literature, cinema, and even music, all at a time when each day seems to make us just a little more conscious and aware of the real-life horrors unfolding all around us… While radioactive clouds blow west and test-ban treaties go up in a mushroom of poisonous smoke, punk bands gob out splatter-movie imagery with a ferocity that at best signals hopeless defiance and at worst a perverse and nihilistic acceptance of the situation.
“Like it or not, horror is part of our media, part of our culture, part of our lives—none of which answers the question of why an entire society should stand around engrossed, reading Dracula while up to their jugulars in blood. Do we immerse ourselves in fictional horror as a way of numbing our emotions to its real-life counterpart? Is it some sort of inoculation…a tiny dose of something frightening with which we hope to ward off a more serious attack in later life? Could it even represent a useful, if not vital tool with which we enable ourselves to investigate and understand the origins of horror without exposing ourselves to physical or mental harm? Whatever the answer, the fact still stands: horror fiction of one form or another is a major totem of the twentieth century. We’ve all seen it. We know what to expect from it, its general content and the rules that it plays by. It is the very familiarity of horror in our culture, however, that makes this introduction necessary: whatever kind of horror you’ve chanced across in your various readings and viewing to date, Swamp Thing isn’t that kind of horror. I’m not saying that it’s better, or that it’s worse, just that it’s different. You’d do well to bear this in mind as you proceed.”
Alan Moore – The Saga of the Swamp Thing 1987 written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, colored by Tatjana Wood and lettered by John Costanza and Todd Klein. Originally created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson.
There have been heavy-handed hints in Tumbleweed Dealer’s discography as to their affinity for the bog, as can be heard in their southern-lathed desert rock piece Trudging through an Egyptian swamp from their self-titled debut. And damn, do yourself a favor and go check out their whole discography starting with that very album. The first thing you’ll notice is the volume levels. I only had it on like 34% and it has a lot of kick. Their whole digital discography is available at a steal of $8 with the purchase of the new album.
There exists a good in-depth discussion on the making of the current album that didn’t garner that many views as of yet from back in May where founder Seb Painchaud talks about how the album is in some ways a ‘bucket-list’ one for being able to go a bit further with the help of fellow artists. Also, thinking about the record as something that won’t be played live opened avenues on what was possible in layering it with all the rich ingredients one experiences on each listen (it’s time-stamped at the 57 second mark to skip the sponsored content, and the actual interview runs for about 13 minutes):
A Distant Figure in the Fog opens haltingly with aural perspective shifts in stereo and semblances and hints of a space opera burgeoning. A silence ensues, a smooth drop, and then a raising of the foliage-bedizened lean-to curtain.
Floral tonalities that at first opened as lament are joined with choral resonance and keys of solemnity. Percussive cymbal constructs circle a musical cornucopia in slow motion married with the urgency of a sped-up and ascending bass countdown. Reads like it’s conflicting, however it’s the best a non-muso can do in describing the incredible layering achieved. If A Distant Figure In The Fog was released as an album teaser it would have been an alluring one, ensnaring, over too quickly and therefore complete.
A wall of sound accentuated by an organ reminiscent of a place of worship, this temple is not walled but an amphitheater covered with a canopy of black willows, swamp maple, and chestnut oak trees, and perhaps some imposing black mangroves.
Sparks Adrift In The Louisiana Nightsky ushers in more alien choralities, gorgeous interplay between instrumentation that supports and breathes organically, amplified through mycelium, reverbed with lichen. There is an insistence to these tracks as if they were waiting ever less patiently to be hard-lined into a computer as a formula for life-affirmation.
If you don’t know much about the celebrated content confirmed as inspiration, as a mostly instrumental album you won’t be bogged down or lost in a sludgy mire, for there are enough allusions as to the affect of its origin. The music can be enjoyed without any prior introduction, seeing as the band did not try to follow the storyline chronologically.
The darker sci-fi tones and ’80s retro motifs from earlier revisit in track 3, A Plant That Thinks It’s Human, taken a step further with beautifully colored synths. Tremolo’d leads of the bright kind, pastoral electronic piano, and later darker electronica take the foreground, but as much as those sounds dominate the soundscape, the percussion and bass in the rhythm section are simply astounding to behold.
This track speaks towards the most poignant part of the lore. The creature that lives in a dream of being the human that is no more. Infected by the collective memory and consciousness of that ape within a humanoid form, but wholly made up of flora. The realization it comes towards is encapsulated in track 7, which the band decided to extrapolate upon and to take the bold step of inviting the voice of a storied non-fictive human. Below is a spliced version of the original page where that title gets its name:
There is not a skippable track present, as is the case with Becoming One With The Bayou. You might’ve encountered that bait before, just like some of the signatures from bygone records that pop up briefly, though this time round it feels like Dark Green stands on its own with a texture and feel that resonates throughout.
Trumpets, flugelhorns, and trombones erupt in triumph and sound like they could be an irreplaceable accompaniment to a film rendition if ever another one were to be made. It’s been filmed a few times already, but it is hard not to use that overblown and overused term ‘cinematic’ when it comes to the tunes found on Dark Green. It’s a big album and it deserves every bit of praise.
The transition into the next track is less smooth, it opens crustily and then the bass and guitar chemistry playfully reminds us that this thing should be amped up and listened to loud enough to get the gators out of slumber and to spook the native Louisiana nightjars, owls, and hawks out of the bald cypress trees.
Not content with just painting a picture of pretty sunsets in a rich ecology of the wetlands, the whole movement speeds up as if we are literally being dragged across sludge by a high-powered bayou boat through weeds, mud, black willow fronds, no time to be swallowed by doomy quicksand or hungry carnivorous vines; we reach our destination of the title track lashed, seared, and muddied, and upon more intimate inspection every tear of cloth and rip of skin intricately placed as if that journey through a gauntlet held by the jungle itself was orchestrated and conducted by Gaia incarnate.
I’m going to have to cheat and use the words written about the title track published here before:
“Dark Green [supplies] some flavors otherworldly for a succor to a sonic absence you did not know you had. Fear not, as the title track of Tumbleweed Dealer’s new album implies, darkness ever looms in the shadows of the glades and edges of the forest clearings that the nascency of this next track and its accompanying video suggests, and it not so much as seeps but cascades forth at times.
Tumbleweed Dealer are now in their 4th iteration and Dark Green, the record, has been stewing for more than 8 years.
That’s a dangerous amount of time to give a walking musical compendium, an overqualified studio hermit, and a polymorphic cephalopod to progressively add more layers to what must already have been a filthily alluring genesis. From their Instagram:
‘JB has been working with us since the first album, recording and mixing, but has joined on as a full-time member contributing to the creative process. Angelo came in early in the writing process of the new album and his innovation and energetic style has contributed a lot in shaping our new direction.’
We live in a time of exponentially ramped-up change, a transition into our final dystopian form, and if you talk to people working in the field of climate change, things can seem pretty bleak, but the same experts would have you know that progress is being made. Tumbleweed Dealer’s new album is an attempt to portray the quintessence of mother nature’s ire towards the hairy apes swarming its expanse and laying waste to its riches.
Might one have had no prior knowledge of Tumbleweed Dealer before hearing this new offering, one listen to “Dark Green” would be enough to deduce that they do have some metal chops. If somehow you missed the double bass and tremolos, then take a jump on the way-back machine and experience Unquintessence, a now defunct black metal project of the bassist that delivered some mind-warping-ly vehement black metal.
Founder Seb Painchaud has been in the scene for a long time, having also played in the brutal death metal project Withdraw, melodic/tech death band Winter Bestowed, black ‘n’ rolling Vatican, tech/death inspired metalcore band The Last Felony (whose final album, Too Many Humans is quite the popular moniker, for if you try searching it in Bandcamp you’ll get to this project with that name and which is closer to the modern iterations of Painchaud’s musical partialities – more on that later), blackened death metal project Nefastüs Diès (perhaps the reason why Painchaud doesn’t do music with vocals anymore), mathcore project Ion Dissonance, and melodic/death/metalcore project Adenine.
Enough background, a note or two about the single: If there was no video accompanying this majestic track then images of forests and jungles time-lapsed and sped up were the first that came to my mind. Just as you supposed you stumbled on a heath, your sonic limbs sink into a fen’s peaty soil, never bogged down, but with the knowledge that you tread in fuel fit for a conflagration; for the terrain you roam has surreal properties with augmented physics. The music video is suitably psychedelic and edited beautifully around the movements of the music.
This is one of those compositions that requires total immersion. Recorded with finetuned care so you can hear all the little fret squeaks before they ramp up the ambience straight from a John Frusciante record. With synths and other keys that chameleon-ize said maestro’s voice, later emulating the sound of a backing choir that then morphs into church organ.
‘Dark Green‘ first got premiered on Decibel where the band shared these thoughts on how the title track acts as the cipher or linchpin for the whole album (There are more cool thoughts from the band in that premiere if you appreciate a good metaphor, so follow the Decibel link too):
‘The title track of the album, ‘Dark Green,’ represents the duality of the title. The first half is like moss covered post-rock while the second is a bleaker voyage with twists and turns and unexpected plot twists that re-contextualizes everything you’ve heard up until that point. Between the vintage keys, double bass drums and saxophone solo, we touch upon the different influences in our sound, both modern and retro, while filtering it all through our unique melodic pallet.’
‘It’s a great introductory point for the album, and its quest to marry opposing musical forces to evoke surreal feelings within the listener. ‘Dark Green’ is the pent-up hatred of the forest, thickets, and swamps towards mankind, but it is also the loss of individuality most of us feel deep within ourselves when something shakes us to our very core.’
When the atmospherics basking in the background saunter forth, the darker shades of green start to realize and the track enters the domain of prog royalty. As a double kick is racing the throbbing-for-the-last-gasp procreative releases of the bass before flamenco-picking a Morricone lick ghosted into a pregnant silence to just nod for the memory of a note that enticingly lures like an anglerfish with, “you ready for more?”
The timestamp at termination is 4:51 but this is some form of dimension-manipulating chronomancy because the track feels like it is over quicker than Napalm Death’s “You Suffer.” That means I’m either suffering from THC-induced crapulence or my favorite drug just happens to be music; and when it’s layered this well, with so much to encounter on repeat listens, it can truly have the magical property of transcendental transportation.”
Ghosts Dressed In Weeds is a plurality; it is one of the best tracks of 2025, transcending genre. The vocal performance by Ceschi Ramos is nothing short of spectacular, the delivery is pitch-, beat-, and rhythmically so on-point with lyrics that cut deep; it’s also prescient and dare I say sing-along-able. It can be applied to everyday ennui, it can and does reach wider though, into the landscape of where we are economically, politically, and morally in our aspiration to be human in this third decade of the 21st century.
It’s the only track to ever contain vocals on any TD album and this elevates it even more; instead of being just a curiosity it holds steadfast as one of the biggest tracks on the record. Ranging from the fricative alliterative to internal rhymes for emphasis, the range alone of the chords they chose to accentuate and breathe fire into the 7th track could not have been more perfect. If perchance like me, you haven’t checked out Ceschi’s other work, then I’m sure the video below will suffice to convince you of their mastery.
Moss on the Mind is a cleanser, no throwaway, we get them electro chorus accents again. It’s a preparation for the longest song on here. Making filmic insinuations have credence for a band that likes to flip scripts on expectation, and they have made movie music before. 2014’s Western Horror had a makeshift film poster with credits akin to a western movie as cover art and they even touted it as a soundtrack for an imaginary film.
Kudos to the artist that decides to take on the project for the not so short film; it clocked in at nearly 47 minutes. In retrospect one can also see the grislier titled tracks in their discography being more stretched in length, like A Scythe In One Hand, A Shotgun In The Other, …And The Horse You O.D.’d On. The longest track they ever recorded though was How To Light A Joint With A Blowtorch. The first one is the Kashmir of stoner prog rock. A very vague music calque yes, but I’ll stand by my assertion, the ‘reaper with a shotgun’ song is every bit as epic as the un-source material. It’s only by their third full-length, TDIII – Tokes, Hatred & Caffeine, that as a whole their albums followed shorter-formed, more condensed and concise writing.
Nothing prepared anyone for what was on offer within Dark Green though. Not that their prior output falls short in any way, it is that their 2025 album took a trajectory of concept rooted in a form of media that according to one of its biggest voices enjoys a quality that not many other forms can claim, that of “duration.” “The stories here don’t end—not in the way a movie ends or a book ends. Oh, the current menace may be averted or triumphed over, but there’ll be something else along in a month’s time, sure as eggs is eggs. The story rarely ends, even when the books carrying it cough blood and drop dead at its feet. Nor, … does the story ever begin. Anyone picking up a comic book for the first time is almost certain to find themselves in the middle of a continuum that may have commenced before the reader’s birth, and will quite possibly continue long after his or her demise.” Painchaud et al. infused Dark Green with some sort of voodoo haze, because it felt timeless from the first play through.
A steady rise in synth-washed percussive resolve before the bass hypes up stoned as hell guitar tones. This time round, instead of just teasing or acting as cliffhanger, Body Of The Bog is the release, and another raising of the curtain with the return of the horn section and an organ playing gospel from the specter of an old submerged swampland church.
The closer, Soul Made Of Sludge, has tinges of lament and melancholia, a bass line and percussion driving a rhythmic tone of anticipation with the other strings and electronica acting not as foil but as the knowing embrace of departure. It is the percussive flurries and bruising boisterous bass-play as the closer fades into the mire that informs us that we might not wait that long for the next one.
Dark Green is fittingly multifarious for a person with interests as far-reaching as Seb Painchaud. His face will pop up if there was an encyclopedia entry for eclectic music taste. You should therefore not miss his end-of-year list which is one of the more diverse and unpredictable lists NCS hosts every year — including the one for last year.
Dark Green was an independent release; it is available digitally on Bandcamp and you can still grab the whole discography for only $8 at the link below. There are no plans for a physical release yet, seeing as labels have astoundingly not shown any interest as of this writing. I’m not sure how labels, especially independent ones, can not be piqued by art that dredges pelagic depths and would induce any southern lord to run for cover in their full contact safari gear in fear of a riot season of papercuts (the word ‘records’ is missing six times from that sentence).
Purchase: https://tumbleweeddealer420.bandcamp.com/album/dark-green
Listen/Stream:
credits
released February 7, 2025
Line Up:
Seb Painchaud – Bass & Guitars
Angelo Fata – Drums & Percussions
Jean-Baptiste Joubaud – Synths & Programming
Guest Musicians:
Antoine Baril – Mellotron, Hammond Organ & Keyboards on tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9 & 10
Guillaume Audette – Wurlitzer, Rhodes and Church Organ on tracks 8 & 10
Jocelyn Couture – Trumpet & Flugel Horn on tracks 4, 5, 7 and 9
Loïc Roy-Turgeon – Trombone on tracks 4 and 5
Zach Strouse – Saxophone on track 6
Ceschi Ramos – vox on track 7
All songs written by: Tumbleweed Dealer
• Produced by: Jean-Baptiste Joubaud
• Mixed by: Jean-Baptiste Joubaud
• Mastered by: Harris Newman
• Album Artwork by: Glenn Le Calvez
TD Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tumbleweeddealer/
TD FB: https://www.facebook.com/TumbleweedDealer/