Who: Dead Season

What: Oxford band playing in Lewiston

Where: Bull Moose at the Lewiston Mall on Lisbon Street

When: 5:30 p.m. Wednesday

Metal band rages against cancer

LEWISTON – When a metal band starts to do its thing, you often wonder what motivates the words behind the screaming guitars and angry drum punches.

For Dead Season, cancer plays a role.

A day before they play at Bull Moose in Lewiston, the band from Oxford revealed that much of their new CD focuses on the deadly disease and the victims it carries away.

“The writing, recording of this new album was very hard on me and Ian because we had to deal with some extremely hard losses in our family due to cancer,” said Matt Truman, who with his brother Ian forms the nucleus of Dead Season.

Their favorite uncle died last year, a victim of cancer. The band wrote a song about it called “The End.”

In February, their mother, Margaret Truman, succumbed after a five-year battle with ovarian cancer.

“Cancer eventually overtook her digestive system and we had to watch her starve to death over her last couple months, something that will haunt us forever,” Matt Truman said in a prepared statement. “Me and Ian find that music is the best way for us to deal with our grief, so we wrote the song ‘Mother’ and actually were able to play it for her acoustically before she passed away, and played it acoustically at her funeral.”

They also wrote the song “Cancer” to round out the new album and to further express their pain and rage. Then there is the song “Hero,” which they wrote for their father.

Not that Dead Season is all gloom. Their music is described as heavy but melodic enough to attract interest from the biggest radio stations.

“They’re super nice guys, too,” said Amanda Flanagan, of gBritt Public Relations in Portland.

The new CD, “When Everything’s Lost,” is due out next week. On Wednesday, Dead Season will perform for free at Bull Moose at the Lewiston Mall on Lisbon Street. The show gets under way at 5:30 p.m.