Derek Grant, drummer for Alkaline Trio, has uncovered eight songs from his past, when he was known as the Reaper and sang for a band called Dead End. Lucky for us, Grant has made all of the songs available for free



"For a period of about three years I answered only to the name Reaper. My hair style changed slightly, but I still retained all of the b-movie mentality of those early days (I ask myself now, has it ever gone away?) The tapes I had made found their way into the hands of some older musicians who wanted to start a band, and so Dead End was born," Grant said on a recent MySpace blog. "I continued to write new material and when we could, we would borrow devices to record. Thus, documenting the rise of Reaper - through puberty and beyond (you can actually here my voice change throughout these recordings.) After a few short years of playing parties, roller skating rinks, and punk clubs the band drifted apart."

Grant goes on to explain the detailed process of editing the songs to make them more pleasing to the ear...

"I transferred a few songs to Pro-Tools to see about remixing them - what I found was some dreadfully recorded instruments, and a whole lot of poorly played music. My first instinct was to just re-record the songs, perhaps change some lyrics, and re-arrange the songs a bit. But while I am hopefully a more accomplished musician than I was 18 years ago, there's a spirit and energy to those songs that I could never recreate. It lives in the words and the vocals. So the decision was made to re-record the music around the vocal tracks. I set about picking my favorite of the songs, digitizing all of the vocal tracks and EQ-ing them to sound half-way intelligible. I spent two days relearning and re-recording all of the guitar parts, then I took the recordings to Sonic Iguana Studios. There Mass Giorgini (Anti-Flag, Alkaline Trio) and Phillip Hill (Anti-Flag, Rise Against) helped me to record the drums. In keeping with the original spirit, everything was recorded and mixed as quickly and haphazardly as possible."



You can download all eight songs here and read a brief synposis of each song here.

Meanwhile, Alkaline Trio released their sixth full-length, Agony and Irony, on July 1.

What do you think of Dead End? Sound to me like The Ramones meets The Misfits!