Article - Dead Confederate feeling festive in preparation for new album

It’s been an eventful year for Dead Confederate. Since last September’s release of the debut LP Wrecking Ball, they’ve appeared on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and recently finished a tour with childhood heroes Dinosaur Jr. This weekend, the Athens quintet pulls double-duty closer to home, performing at both AthFest and Corndogorama.
??Dead Confederate’s sultry psych rumble evokes a range of acts including Pink Floyd’s spacey atmospherics, the Black Angels’ primal drone, and My Morning Jacket’s Southern-fried guitar rawk. They came into existence in the late ’90s as the jam-oriented act Red Belly Band. After graduating from college, they set about pursuing music in earnest, embarking on a new sound, name and outlook.??“We fell in love with creating music all over again,” says singer/guitarist Hardy Morris. “We were floundering as a college band that didn’t take themselves too seriously. Then we started writing some songs that really mattered to us and it took on a whole ’nother level.”??At the end of the summer, the band plans to release a live EP culled from a recent show at the Earl. The show’s extended set was peppered with covers and seldom-heard B-sides, though they haven’t decided which songs or how many they’ll include on the disc. ??They’ve also been sketching out new songs for a future LP. According to Morris, everyone’s been writing and the plan is to cut raw demos before revisiting them together in the studio. “We want to make it a more creative process,” Morris says. “The last record we just kind of recorded it and this time we’re going to make it.”??Morris says he’s looking forward to playing this weekend’s Corndogorama, but hopefully he won’t forget his guitar on stage like he did two years ago. “I had just bought it from my friend at the time, and I was like, ‘Ohmigod, what have I done’,” he says. “Luckily they found it and were nice enough to return it to me.”