Heads
s/t

Hello Ed, thank you for sending me a CD by your band Heads which is you the Australian and two German fellows. There is a thing I notice with some bands and that is having a quite generic name tends to hurt visibility, a name like Heads is cool but if you want to know about this band you have to know where they are on the internet as a search on Heads gives many results that are not of this band. So Ed, if you want to be more noticed you should have given your debut album a title. The cover is cool and what better label to release an album on than This Charming Man Records? I can’t think of a better name for a label that release heavy music.

Because heavy is what this album is, dark and atmospheric with six tracks and a rather strong variation on an album that is short and to the point. Good vocals that are quite like what we hear on many of the sludge albums I have heard but with a touch of Australian feel, in fact some touches of this album reminds me of an Australian band that is named Alchemist, particularly the opening track. The production is excellent, one of the better productions I have hard when it comes to this kind of music – that alone could make it worth looking into.

There is more however, the songs are all good and the musical journey through dark atmospheres is well worth taking. I think they nail it with this album. Well, almost as there are some weaker points (not weak points, just a little weaker) like the second track. I don’t condone Chewing on Kittens but it is not the title that is the problem it is that the track is not good enough to advance the story like the other five tracks, it is a decent track but not at the level of the rest of the album. Another slightly weaker point is that the album doesn’t have a real standout track, not that there are tracks that stand out but there is none that really stand apart from the rest of the album and the genre. Still, this is a bit of nit-picking which is something us critics should do, overanalyse the albums and bring out the highlights and the weaknesses and there are a lot more of the former than of the latter on this album.

Half of the tracks stand slightly apart and kind of opens new chapters on the story, these are the opener A Mural is Worth a Thousand Words, Black River and the ending The Voynich Manuscript – these are excellent tracks highlighting a great album. A great album I can recommend to anyone who enjoys different routes and doesn’t like the generic stuff that is churned out into the heavy rock and metal genre every day. I think they manage the great feat of being both familiar and fresh – it is an exciting musical journey that is well worth taking but use the links to the left as a web search will only lead to heads-scratching… I will however no condone chewing on kittens, that is just cruel.

HHHHHHH