Nothing has a beginning or an end. The internet collapsed the whole idea of time. One era bleeds into another. Listening to the new EP from Headsend; you could be in 1992, living through the grunge era, but that’s not a bad thing.
Imagine a butterfly in a bottle. That’s a Headsend record in miniature. This EP sounds like three guys in a room. It’s the opposite of the Pro Tools, overproduced, internet era music. It has focus and direction, and avoids the modern impulse of just mashing everything together. It’s something beautiful, captured.
In the early 2000s, the Garage Rock Revival brought back lo-fi sounds in response to mainstream pop stars and overproduction. This is doing the same. Basically, Headsend have resurrected Nirvana. You see the problem with Kurt Cobain’s crew being so massive is that anyone who sounds even broadly similar can’t help but be compared to them. While reductive, it’s not unwarranted. You can hear it in the way Bon Soric batters his drum kit, in the big basslines from Kyruss King, in Rasmus King’s distorted guitars, and especially in the way King’s voice wavers between a croon and a yell. They make so many of the same choices it leaves ‘A Delicate Balance’ sounding like a hypothetical follow-up to ‘Nevermind’. Not the radio hits though, the noisy, power trio jams in songs like ‘Aneurysm’ or ‘You Know You’re Right’. Thankfully, it’s a great sound.
The slowly building ‘Sit With’ is in no hurry at all; that is, until it’s blown apart by bomb-drops of distortion in the choruses, while King’s meandering vocals lend it an emotional rawness. Similarly the Jang-a-lang strumming that opens ‘Biopsy Of Unknown’ feels almost louche as a wall of distortion erupts around it. On ‘Brown Tooth’, the tempered, picked notes give it more space for what is an anguished, musical plea. The same vibe runs through ‘Slayerish’ where the groan and squeal of distorted amps is held together by the filthy rhythm section. Only ‘Free’, the third track, feels like an actual song, to the point the EP feels like a series of song-shaped jam sessions broken up by an absolute banger. This isn’t a bad thing at all, although it seems so different to the other tracks you do get the feeling it was an elbow-in from their label EMI.
The EP’s strongest feature is its sound. The production and mix feel real and dirty, yet clear. It’s all about texture. You can hear the amps bleeding and the drums pounding. It captures a raw, emotional energy without sounding amateurish. This is important where songs like the feedback-riddled ‘Slayerish’ run loose without becoming messy. Mostly though, it all hangs on King’s honest voice. Rather than singing, per se, he wrings anguish out of every word and sound, and it’s beautiful.
Headsend’s second EP is raw and loose but sounds reassuringly expensive. It’s a snapshot of three people working through their emotions and its greatest strength is that it really is ‘A Delicate Balance’.
IAN KENWORTHY