by JOHNSON CUMMINS

With the radio dial's insistence on formula - three-minute caps with mandatory chorus inserted before the first minute's up, regimented BPMs and so on - we're starting to see more and more bands rebelling against the claustrophobic confines of the prefab pop ditty. At the same time, modern psychedelic bands like Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple and Montreal's Shalabi Effect all manage to explore rock's darkest reaches, and take their sweet time doing it, while sidestepping the Pink Floyd clichés and muscular, '70s-arena-rock posturing. Washington, D.C's Dead Meadow fit that bill too.

"More and more people are responding to organic, manmade music," explains Dead Meadow drummer Steve McCarthy, on the line from the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. "I can't say that the sorry state of radio is solely to blame, or if it's other cultural influences, but a lot of people are trying to get away from the bullshit."

If you have hippy-dippy visions of barefoot dancers, dreamcatchers and brown acid when you hear the word "psychedelic," you haven't heard this relatively new crop of bands who are getting down to the actual sonic essence of the word. Dead Meadow's sound can reach the heights of pure noise as much as it can lull you. "Rock music isn't a bad thing and we shouldn't be ashamed of ourselves for trying to play it. Almost every modern rock band that's calling itself a rock band now is an embarrassment, so it's a big job to play rock music and play it right."

Sadly, even classic-rock radio does very little to hip people to the history of the genre, devoted as it is to playing tried and true hits to death while "getting the Led out" every hour or so. Thankfully, there are shows like Little Steven's Underground Garage and psych-specific programming on college radio that are starting to unearth psychedelic music that falls from the wayside of the classic-rock radio format. "I would say that U.K. magazines especially are starting to concentrate on filling in the blanks for music fans and are really explaining the history right now. In America, they're still concentrating on current pop-punk or '80s-styled bands, and those forms just seem so diluted."

Dead Meadow came from the P.C. punk rock scene of the U.S. capital and, although they were all weaned on bands like Fugazi, these admitted "heads" gathered inspiration from the rear-view mirror, plugging into the heavy sounds of Hendrix and Led Zeppelin when the band was just forming.

"We came from punk rock and post-punk backgrounds, but we wanted to play something completely different than that. The first thing we ever started listening to was psychedelic rock music and it just felt really natural for us to come back to that. In D.C., everybody came from a punk-rock background, which made every band start sounding the same - and that just wasn't punk rock at all. We wanted to be more rebellious than what punk rock had to offer. We play psychedelic music but it's because of our punk-rock influence that we deal with it in such a loud, aggressive way."

With Squalor and Jennifer Gentle at l'Hémisphère Gauche on Tuesday, March 29, 9 p.m., $10

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