The Dead C don’t really strike me as a group that has ‘casual fans’. You’re either all-in, or dismissive. But if you want to teeter on the edge of interest, then Vain, Erudite and Stupid is as good as any selection of songs from their history to get you started. It tracks their then-nineteen year history with admirable patience and reverence, offers a few treats to hardcore fans, and lets you know what you’re in for when you buy any non-compiled Dead C album – a complex, rigorous, and uncompromising miasma of improvised rock music that occasionally hints at songs, but just as often meanders into thickets of noise and squalor. They’re a group that’s always, somehow, known exactly what they’re doing, even as the two guitarists, Bruce Russell and Michael Morley, seem to be encouraging each other to play at cross purposes, while the drummer, Robbie Yeats, tries to lasso them to some sort of sense. It’s a tightrope walking act that always, somehow, contrives to succeed.