When brothers Ben and Josh Strong convened the recording project Gosteleradio in the wake of their former band Plug-In City, which flamed out after a dance-punky EP on Modular, maybe they didn’t intend on a tribute to their more timeless music heroes. But that’s how Great Deeds Against The Dead ends up sounding: a loving inhabitation of classically cut Beatles melodies, lugubrious Pink Floyd tempos and widescreen landscapes somewhere between the two.

Now a working trio with the addition of TTT’s Marty Umanski on drums, Melbourne’s Gosteleradio (pronounced Gostel-e-radio) is named after the former Soviet Union’s state overseers of broadcasting. This debut album includes some guest singers in Oliver Mann, Felicity Cripps of Houlette and the Strongs’ sister Manny, but those mostly manifest as distant harmonies. The Strong brothers alternate lead vocals, which they have admitted are nearly indistinguishable from each other, and sing the closer harmonies. There are three instrumentals as well, ranging from the boldly searching electric lead of ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’ to the fleeting transition of ‘A Wake…’ and ‘The Troubles’, which opens with church organ and applies another narcotic drum beat to an album already full of them.

That’s the thing about Great Deeds: it’s familiar not just in its banner-sized influences but in the singular vibe pursued by nearly every song. Whether you see it as a Saturday night chill-out record or a Sunday morning comedown record, it’s almost impossibly mellow. Even the post-apocalyptic thread to the lyrics is rendered as just another serene portal to navel-gazing oblivion. That’s not to say the songs aren’t there, however. There are slowmo hooks and gorgeous song structures all over the album, with keyboards often producing either a hazy sheen or a plodding, piano-like gravity. The ripe, breathy vocals are quietly endearing, whether garnering Beach Boys comparisons on the single ‘The Reprisal’ or veering into the British Invasion pop of The Hollies and The Zombies with the ornate two-minute anomaly ‘Elysian Fields (Ill-Gotten Gains)’.

Near the end of the album, the formula begins to diversify a bit. ‘A Thousand Ships’ has more of a cosmic prog bent, and ‘Glass Clouds’ tries seasick synths against a slightly more awake rhythm section. But all is all, this is very much a one-note record, which is actually sort of admirable. There’s no obvious concessions to audiences, unless you count the relative proximity of ‘Elysian Fields’ to The Shins, and none of the convenient trend-hopping that hampered Plug-In City.

by Doug Wallen