The Heads (GBR)
Under The Stress Of A Headlong Dive

THE REVIEW

The Heads pound out the most dizzying and enjoyable hard psych-stoner-garage in the entire solar system. As influences behind their sound, they cite groups like Loop, Spacemen 3, Stooges, and Monster Magnet. They think of their music as a mix of heavy psychedelic rock that is sometimes "vaguely stoner" and other times more crudely punk, and if you ask them what they think of the contemporary scene, they only speak well of Lightning Bolt and Oneida. Simon Price (guitar and vocals) has a seemingly endless collection of distortion pedals that he used to list on the back covers of LPs – he doesn't anymore, because the list inevitably grew longer with each album – while Hugo Morgan (bass) found – who knows where – an old and strange fuzz pedal, repaired it, and now uses only that one; Wayne Maskell (drums), on the other hand, built his own snare drum that – so he claims – has the power to emit radio waves every summer solstice. Since they've been composing and playing together, the Heads credit every single track to the entire band because that's what Black Sabbath did before them; their personal label is called Sweet Nuthin' in honor of Fred 'Sonic' Smith (may God rest his soul) and his legendary Sonic's Rendezvous Band. From 1995 to today, an infinite number of singles, EPs, and albums (above all "Relaxing with The Heads", "Everybody Knows We Got Nowhere", "Under Sided" and the magmatic live-studio "At Last") form a fabulous sonic arabesque, an anti-career consumed in the underground of Bristol and marked only by the genuineness and passion with which these guys "make music" in total creative freedom, outside all commercial logic.

"Under The Stress Of A Headlong Dive" brings them back to the current scene as indisputable, acid agitators and intergalactic fuzz dissonauts. Double vinyl at 180 gr., brand new logo, and a minimalist-kraut style cover: the little details of infatuation. Then, a rain of fuzzedelic energy that reawakens early Sonic Youth ("Earth Sun"), gets lost in a hallucinatory, staggering trip to Neu! ("Pass, the Void", intervals of "Kang" and "Cloud"), accelerates the 13th Floor Elevators ("Return Of The Bemmie"), and transforms Spacemen 3 into a black meteor crashing into a swamp of mud ("Swamp of Chutney Morgan"). "We Descend From?" sets a powerful and fierce tempo, with Simon Price's voice (normalized, with that so overtly English and almost 'bored' accent that is brilliant precisely in giving the opposite effect to his patterns) leading and reorganizing a crazy spill of wah-fuzz-wah guitars that suddenly intercede for a funk march and then explode again with double the power. Then, the twenty minutes of "Stodgy" take the Stooges into Can's rehearsal room (a hypothesis that works for me as the Madonna's vision would for a Catholic, I believe) and then they all go to drink at Monster Magnet's house with the concluding "Creating In The Eternal Now Is Always Heavy", which sounds like the band's manifesto from the title alone.

74 (numbers, cabala...) minutes of massive groove attitude coagulated with a madly successful search for the most dilated free-form; electronic and analog effects create a psychedelic trip canvas, "basement" acoustics mixed with a hyper-layered sound production, filthy garage riffs interspersed with sidereal soundscapes and suffocated ultra-tribal percussion. It takes you a week to identify all the sounds that emerge in just four minutes of each single track. I love them, really.

Album of the month and (unless there’s a sudden rain of frogs) of the year.