Head Of David
Dustbowl

THE REVIEW

It's 1988. Something is about to happen, you can feel it in the air. It's the end. The end of a system of life that has influenced the existence of millions of people. As if there were a bomb, saturated with uranium, contaminating, mocking, ready to explode in the faces of three generations of people unaware of the future that awaits them. Unaware that sooner or later it would happen, that we would really get here, where we are now.

Rock music, in those space-time moments, is the most exhausted and devastated thing that exists. Dark, new wave, punk, heavy metal: decomposing corpses kept warm, alive, attached to respirators of pure irritating-advertising ether. All around, nothingness.

It is in this nothingness that impossible things emerge, peeled away from the forced darkness of a mass consumerist lifestyle that, already rampant, does not understand that it is dead. It is in this void that the anguished and prophetic lyrics of Stephen Reuben Burroughs echo, which unlike the more famous William, makes the tangible sound of a surreal wave motion, a shamefully static existence, plasticized and oppressive like that of the late '80s world.

"Dustbowl" (Blast First, 1988) is a kick in the stomach. One of those impacts that hurt. One of those impacts labeled Head Of David, a seminal band and forefather of an artistic future that would later reward in major venues realities like Ministry, NIN, and rightly so, indeed much more than all that, quite significant people, and certainly not uninvolved in the reference situation, like Godflesh. And here we come to the point: Justin Broadrick, drummer of this spectacular light/dark creature, achieves a colossal feat like merging such a difficult, putrid and decadent genre as the most primitive industrial, with the much more excruciating themes so dear to the sounds of the darkest and barest metal. Without wanting to take anything away from Eric Jurenovski (guitarist), in this work, all the main metrics that characterize Broadrick's futuristic and much more fortunate project can already be heard, to which good part of the credit for every single track is obviously attributable. Snake Domain, Ditchwater, and the even more astonishing Dog Day Sunrise take root in a listening experience that becomes progressively more oppressed, fatigued and heartbreaking, leaving for all the 48 minutes of duration, the ascetic hope of being able to expiate a pain for which the name will never be known. Out of fear, or by a vow held with oneself. A cold, yet lashing and monochromatic bassline, will layer every possible self-destructive solution of your thoughts, forcing them in a more than irreversible way to accept the childish fate to which you have recklessly decided to dedicate yourself. Several times, I thought about how much Steve Albini has done, surely in an unconscious way, for the stability of a sacred and marvelous subgenre like the one in question. Yes. Because if creatures like this could be born, part of the credit, indirectly of course, is also and most importantly his. If the Big Black, in some way, started a total polar revolution in the more experimental alternative punk, Head Of David made it possible to extend, develop, and grow phenomena like sludge-metal.

More than that, they re-generated Metal.

Indeed, tracks like Skin Drill already say everything, but just everything, about the industrial-metal that will come, and therefore I think realizing you are dealing with some hot material, produced before the nineties themselves, has its own charm.

Even in this rare (and limited) reviewing attempt, I offer a strongly recommended and due listen to all the laypeople.