At Last

Dude, they’re called The Heads, for fuck’s sake. It’s all coming from their fried brains, from their amped-up, uh, amps and fuzztone pedals, from their love of outsized riffs. Borne of Hawkwind and Stooges, propelled along by Sabbath, Spacemen, and Sleep, heavy rock is refined by a most un-ironic bunch called The Heads. For the past decade or so, they’ve been putting out albums of jams, sometimes venturing off into a bit of the space rock, but always maintaining a core of head-nodding punch and riffs that demand you assimilate them. Here’s a live-in-studio set (technically, live-in-rehearsal-room) that’ll pummel a few bangers’ heads. As it is a set, the flow is good and there are some sweet segues (though some edits are obvious and bad) so if you want to play bits, be ready to fade in and out.

1. Slow buildup to riff-happy tune with backgrounded vocals
2. Guitar FX out the wah-wah-zoo but not lame-o wankery
3. Stooges-style punk - uptempo and noisy, the vox have a bit of Iggy’s timbre
4. As a spacy synth blurts up up and away in back, the guitars attack at full bore
5. Rhythmically complex verses and skull-pounding choruses
6. Crazy-ass freakouts and purposeful pounding alternate
7. Desperate
8. Touch o’ the goth in doomy descending chord progressions
9. Dense drumming, everything on the verge of exploding out of control
10. Building from clichéd sitar to a guitar-pounding epic with a cool, fluid bassline and when it suddenly ends, there is this awful void in your life…