Nadeem SalaamA Bunch Of Dead People | Your Eternal Reward | Premiere
A Bunch Of Dead People is the Brooklyn-based high energy cult led by singer-songwriter and multi-intrumentalist Ruben Sindo Acosta. We recently learned a lot about the band when I spent an early afternoon in his East Williamsburg abode, filming a short doc uncovering the history of the band and detailing their future.
I’m thrilled for them and for our readership to present Your Eternal Reward, available today, and exclusively streaming on our site as well as through Floordoor Records in limited edition gold vinyl.
Sonically the band fuses influences from soul, funk, and Afro-cuban genres to create a robust blend of adrenaline inducing songs that give hardcore a run for its money. A Bunch Of Dead People is Zach Ryalls on guitars, Corey Zaloom on Keys, David Kurutz on bass, with a revolving selection of drummers and saxophonists, but if history proves to be true, change is a constant with the band.
The record provides plenty of saxophone flutters in free jazz form before evolving into thick funk grooves accompanied by the rawness of Acosta’s vocals and the angular guitar playing of Ryalls. “DeAc” features one of my favorite breakdowns, Acosta sounds like a wolf howling at the moon on a cliff, drenched in echo while the keys carry this hypnotic element that is the undercurrent in their music, when it peaks its head, like on the breakdown of “DeAc,” it’s twice as effective for an otherwise confrontational dynamic found between the battle of Acosta’s vocals with the brass section. This interplay is an ongoing battlement for the record. 
I can’t think of another band that fuses funk rhythms with tiny sonically classic soul quirks, like a fat bass, heavy sax use, and a rounder drum sound, with all that in your face energy, “Spit It Out” is sort of ABOD on full speed with harder rock elements give way to the masterful musicians playing licks like jazz players. This is a anomaly of the band, Ruben Sindo Acosta’s wide music appreciation really shows when you start to dissect and wonder how this could all work esthetically and sonically, luckily music is an art-form where tradition can create something new in the image of the artists hands.
You can see A Bunch Of Dead People tonight playing at their album release show at Sunnyvale. While I think the band (and especially where they began) before officially becoming modern day Dead fit right into the underground garage-rock scene in New York that’s always classically New York, they’re pushing the envelope now and are much tighter than your average genre-defier band.
As Ruben Sindo Acosta stated in our short doc, he wants their live experience to “be like a purging experience.” In that sense, few bands will attain the ability to do what they do live, go see them today, and thank me later for not over selling an undeniable truth, A Bunch Of Dead People are one of the best live bands around, and instead of conforming to the industry (who’s job is to break bands that sound like the bands that broke before them) they started their own label, printed vinyl, and and went on tour. Where for some that may be a cross they carry, for ABOD it’s a mark of the real deal and the energy they bring to whatever they do.