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Rating:
Insurmountable.
Just like the chainmail that served me, for once. Four long years of waiting and a resilience test before the miracle: being able to see the Heads in Italy, albeit within a festival that wasn’t exactly their cup of tea. The fifth edition of the "Stoned Hand of Doom" stops in Rome and keeps all the promises of the lineup: a mega-heavy metal caravan with (apparently) the most interesting emerging bands of the Italian scene and beyond.
I glance at the merchandise stand before entering; a black line of black t-shirts and black records with unoriginal black covers interrupted in the middle by a single explosion of color: the Heads’ vinyl. 50 euros in ten-piece notes is my direct support to the band; I stock up on rarities and 7 inches before tumbling under the stage like a madman. I catch the roaring finale of the White Hills, a glam-psych-stoner line-up that gets me as excited as a can of chinotto bounced on a convenient dirt road.
The emotion doesn’t last long, but I’m not particularly worried about the dense and repetitive boredom first aroused by the local Witchfield and then by the Serpent Cult. I skip with negative scotoma to the English soundcheck, which coincides with the cigarette/ounce-of-beer break of the metalheadz. I approach the busy guys on stage, hand them a pen with my copy of "Tilburg", exchange a few words with bassist Hugo Morgan and guitarist Simon Price, compliments galore while my copy comes back autographed by all.
It’s the top, I’m ready. I'll be waiting for you here.
Paul Allen is a fabulous fellow entirely taken with arranging the pedals in series, his t-shirt reads "psychomania" and Everybody Knows why.
Simon turns and blows his nose, perhaps with the same handkerchief I see him wiping his glasses, and that air of an Oxford graduate disappears for good when he starts the guitar: he is the 2.0 noise technician and not a single intelligible note will come out of his monitors, just a continuous magma of fuzz, feedback, and endless delay covering everything else. They start with a terrifying intro of modal chords that grows into a psychedelic march of distortions aimed at styling the crowd: those who came for Doom leave with a nosebleed.
Next, a packed lunch in the Heavy Metal area with a unique 20-minute block split into "Cardinal Fuzz/Widowmaker/Could Be" shooting full blast a mash of fuzz dissolved in rock’n’roll and leavened in kraut, taking your breath away without even the gratification of applause. Instantly, tense index and little fingers in hand like hemiparesis disappear in all those around me. Hugo and Wayne, bass and drums, maneuver the times and administer the doses, Simon and Paul sing two syllables in total and for the remaining half hour blow up the amplifiers testing the sound yield of the venue and the entire Tuscolano district.
"New Stuff" vs. the tinnitus of the attendees, obsessive freeform structures that stretch like autonomous lizard tails on two/four/six/eight riffs all together, then "Heavy C" and finale in a riot on the very long "Spliff Riff" where, gracefully, Professor Allen grants us a sparkling demonstration of talent, hysterically torturing his guitar for five minutes before collapsing to the ground to fiddle with the pedals in a fuzzdelic delirium.
Concert of the month (and barring a sudden rain of frogs) of the year.
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