Dead Brain Cells

Biography

Dead Brain Cells, often abbreviated as DBC, are a Canadian thrash metal band active from 1986 to 1991. They have reunited occasionally since the early 2000s.

History

Shortened to DBC, the band started in 1985 in Montreal as a small project named Final Chapter by guitar players Eddie Shahini and Gerry Ouellette, who placed an ad in a magazine looking for a drummer. In 1986, former Vomit and the Zits singer Dave Javex Ray-O-Vac (David Leone) and former Unruled and Vomit and the Zits drummer Jeff Saint-Louis, joined Shahini and Ouellette and guitar player Phil Dakin, who switched to bass. The project grew into a band that chose the name Dead Brain Cells over "The Mental Pukes" and "The Retarded Assholes". Leone had made commitments to his job and could not sing with the band anymore. Instead of replacing him, Dakin sang and played bass.
DBC released two albums and toured in mostly Canada and the United States, playing with Slayer, Metal Church, Death, Cannibal Corpse, Lȧȧz Rockit, the Crumbsuckers, Agnostic Front, Bad Brains, Nomeansno, Blind Illusion, Ludichrist, Zoetrope, Detente and Groovy Aardvark, as well as Canadian thrash metal peers Voivod, Sacrifice, Razor and Obliveon. The band's first album, Dead Brain Cells, was released in 1987, followed two years later by a concept album, Universe. The two albums are different. Dead Brain Cells was crossover thrash with songs about politics and society in general. Universe was technical/progressive thrash metal with lyrics about science fiction.
Other than playing live and MusiquePlus airing the music video for "The Genesis Explosion" (from Universe), DBC was not as successful as other thrash metal bands. The band broke up in 1991, while working on an unreleased third album, but have reunited occasionally, and worked on new material.
"The Genesis Explosion" was featured in a Canadian television commercial for Microcell Telecommunications in 2005. The commercial depicts an older woman using her cell phone to win a radio call-in show.
The band's guitarist, Gerry Ouellette, died on November 12, 1994. Original DBC drummer Jeff St. Louis died on December 22, 2019, which happened to be his 61st birthday.
Shahini started a new band in 2009 called Kill of Rights, it includes music written from 1986 to 2013. They released their first album Sign of the Crimes on February 15, 2014.
DBC released their first new songs in 35 years, "Pendulum" and "Sirens", on July 2, 2024.