by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Here’s the problem with the internet: nothing ever dies. If I want to go in 2022 to see a band I loved when I was fifteen, in all likelihood they’ll be playing a festival later this year. No need to hold onto those CDs and tapes, either. I can stream practically every release from bands I loved in my youth. Each week, a new “old” title comes back online, remastered, recontextualized, reborn. While I’m stoked that I can stream, say, the first Karate album or the only album by Antarctica, this zombification of bands is causing an imbalance in the artistic ecosystem. Like Damon Albarn said in a recent interview: “stuff that’s already had its moment is taking up space that something new could grow out of.” He’s right. These zombie bands are making it tougher for new bands to find an audience.
Enter Open Head, a wildly experimental band from Kingston, NY, whose debut album is the flagship release for emerging Los Angeles-via-Upstate New York label I’m Into Life Records. Joy, and Other Sufferings is a confounding, exhilarating, empowering, and breathlessly batshit experience. Based on this collection of tunes, Open Head are one of the most exciting guitar bands to come around in years, the stateside answer to Canada’s Blessed or the UK’s Black Midi. Joy, and Other Sufferings is a statement album, a line in the sand, a challenge to all other modern guitar bands. And in a perfect world, a zombie killer.
As a band who liberally borrows from weirdo-90s-rock, Open Head is fortunate that three of the bands they remind me of are no longer active and are showing little sign of resurrecting: U.S. Maple, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi. Specifically, Open Head play the kind of challenging chaotic no-wave noise music championed on Sister/Daydream-era SY albums, Long Hair in Three Stages/Talker-era Maple, and pick-your-fav Fugazi (feels like In on the Kill Taker to me, but there’s no wrong answer).
Yet, despite clear reference points, what makes Open Head so bewitching is the band’s ability to combine disparate influences into a cohesive sound that couldn’t exist at any other time or in any other place. The band says as much in their bio: “Co-fronted by a POC vocalist/guitarist in the peak of a global pandemic, Open Head has a lot to say about the society and times we’re living in.” And say it, do they. From opener “Joy” – a whirlwind of maniacal guitars and avalanche drums coalescing into a hammerhead groove – to the start-stop waltz of the penultimate “Above All Others” and the Quixotic beauty of closer “…and other sufferings,” Open Head allows the music to punctuate every proclamation, protest shout-speak, and melody sung by the band’s two singer/guitarists, Jared Ashdown and Brandon Minervini.
Throughout Joy, and Other Sufferings, Open Head sound startlingly current, and stubbornly original. Each song on Joy takes the core elements of rock music – guitar, bass, drums, and voice – deconstructs them, then reconstitutes the pieces in the band’s singular image. Panned hard left and right, the guitars on songs like “Enticing Offer” and “Grief” make one feel like you’re listening to the album inside a Gravitron; it’s next to impossible to find your balance. Elsewhere, on “Head Talk,” (which may be the album’s most “accessible” song – and by accessible, I mean that the band stays within shouting distance of rock music normalcy for most of the song’s two and half minutes) the guitars play more complimentary roles to one another, forming the album’s hookiest riffs. Follow-up “Actor” finds both singers shouting a catchy chorus in unity before the song devolves into a slinky stutter of curly-Q guitars and Mattia Lusto’s staccato drumbeat. Here and elsewhere, Jon McCarthy’s bass playing is the songs’ most traditionally melodic element, allowing the guitars to scour the limits of pitch and rhythm. As such, for the listener each song begins like jumping off a ledge into a swiftly moving river, with a sharp intake of breath. Who knows where you’re going once the current takes you.
The album is anchored by the one-two centerpiece of “Life Support” and “Dead Air.” Even without a lyric sheet, “Life Support” feels like the band’s thesis: they’re putting us in cages just to keep ‘em free, they’re putting us away, for what? It’s difficult to ascertain what exactly is going on amidst the discombobulation of the instruments, but reading between the lines, the song speaks to a certain desperation found all around us, an alienation that is inexorably Now.
“Dead Air” works as the companion piece to “Life Support.” Lusto’s drumming here is almost playful, the bass dancing atop it like go-go in ‘80s D.C. All the while, the guitars sparkle and chime. It’s a rare moment of levity on the album. Sure, chaos is never far away. At any moment, the songs of Joy could fall apart. Unlike the zombie bands that the internet – and by extension, all of us nostalgia addicts – won’t let die, every time the tunes of Open Head combust, the band roars back stronger, more vibrant. Joy, and Other Sufferings acts as a vital connection to what it’s like to be alive today. We face an uncertain future with only the ashes of what’s come before with which to construct tomorrow.