A Place To Bury Strangers
Exploding Head
While using Exploding Head as an album title may bring about memories of Scanners, the better Cronenberg comparison is Videodrome--specifically, the part where James Woods shoves his hand inside his stomach vagina. It's not that Head is wet & warm, it's that it's resolutely fucking internal, the kind of music that's best heard inside a cave. Even when it opens up for the title track's 80's dance party, it dives back underneath a bed of dissonance one track later, obsessing over the same bass lick until the drums and guitars--programmed and processed into a screeching roar--fight back and forth over who gets to lay claim to making the most unattractive form of noise. It's the most anti-dance that it can be, and yet it's clearly designed for rocking out. Hail and farewell, No Fun Festivals--we can make out at dawn, we'll use our blood ears as lubricant.
It's not just noise, despite how everything on this album--the guitars, the drums, the vocals--sounds like it was recorded on a tape player sitting next to a busted speaker. That sense of cheapness is part of Exploding Head's charm, in fact, it's part of the band's shtick. When their first album dropped, the reference claims were abundant--it's Jesus & Mary Chain, it's Joy Division, it's this, it's that--and it was hard to argue with them. Exploding Head doesn't refute those claims--for lack of a better, less stupid phrase, it blows them up. Banging on and on, marathoning the bass, the pedals, the effects, the fuzz, this was it: 2009 in aggressive make out sessions. They're making something old new again--but they're going to keep ahold of the dated parts as long as possible. People who hang solo, you're making a mistake. Doing it is the shit.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
Comments