by Chris Polley (@qhrizpolley)
There are only so many albums that can keep you awake. This statement stems from an extended night drive on minimal hours of sleep that I recently endured behind the steering wheel, but it can be interpreted however you wish. The sophomore effort What Is Success by Kingston, NY-based quartet Open Head is one such album. It’s got everything a disgruntled driver might need from a record blasting on a car stereo in pitch black darkness punctuated only by freeway lights: angular post-punk rhythms, mangled noise-rock guitars, and guttural bass tones. Even better? It’s also got the metaphorical amphetamines in spades too: insomnia-addled overthinking, soul-piercing rage, and cold hard dread. It’s not exactly a feel-good record, but staying awake for fear of winding up in a ditch isn’t exactly meant to feel good, now is it?
In the grand tradition of Liars, Pere Ubu, among many other messed-up geniuses, What Is Success is a relentless slog of a record (complimentary) that drills into the listener with an unrepentant, slippery cacophony (still complimentary) and just the right amount of melody and groove as counterbalance underneath. To be blunt, there’s a lot of this kind of aesthetic in punk right now on a macro level (FACS, Gilla Band, Show Me the Body, et. al), but Open Head are coloring outside the lines just enough to make their own indelible mark on the genre. Accompanying the gravel-voiced disaffection and knob-twisting distortion is a throughline of industrial deconstruction and abstract hip-hop that elevate the record in a manner that will equally please fans of Suicide and Death Grips (if either of those fanbases would chill out just a little bit).
“Take It From Me” sits at the album’s center as prime evidence of Open Head’s off-kilter take on no wave. A turgid guitar loop almost imperceptibly breaks down as the song progresses, melting its notes alongside a punishing stop-start hi-hat-heavy beat provided by the project’s innovative drummer Dan Schwartz. The proceedings engulf the listener like the opening track “Success” did about 15 minutes prior with Jon McCarthy’s whirring synth pulse and the near-spoken word contemplation of vocalist Jared Ashdown. The storytelling on display is much more vivid than your average art punk record. “Take It From Me” could be construed as either a common expression (i.e. “trust me”) or a desperate command, perhaps referring to the titular “success” that Ashdown questions at the album’s start. He doesn’t want it anymore, not that he ever really knew what “it” was.
The playful mini-melody motifs throughout the record bolster this thesis, as do the band’s almost blatant musical references to their forebears. Standout track “House” errs just on the side of ethereal, evoking Fugazi’s iconic “Repeater” (which I immediately threw on after Open Head in my epic fight-against-sleep commute). Both share a propulsive percussive pattern and harmonic sonic flourish, while “N.Y. Frills” is a full-tilt mid-00s DFA Records resurrection, replete with sardonic lyrics and the reverb cranked to infinity. A lot of smarty-pants musicians in this cerebral realm of indie rock construct a kind of recursive commentary within their visceral, muscly long players, but Open Head’s willingness to do it with equal parts homage and self-deprecation is a breath of fresh, albeit bitter, air.
And yet, like any band interested in playing the long game (or simply trying to attain some catharsis along with their bookishness), the music works on its own as a primal, aural experience separate from the deep dive into the realm of the id and postmodern. While experimental bangers like “Julo” and “Fiends Don’t Lose” hit hard for anyone who’s interested in simply bumping sweaty torsos together, there is also plenty of borderline academic subtext.
Album closer “Catacomb” may be a bit more on-the-nose for a final dirge than one might expect from a record this stealthy, but between the skittering call-and-response instrumentation and deeply frightening lyrical warning (“no tomorrow, no change” caterwauls Ashdown), it’s still an apt and affecting one. And as the bass growls and ping-ponging guitar falls apart in the closing bars, it becomes clear that this is the kind of demented honesty and incessant needling required to keep oneself awake. Some people might prefer to get some shut eye before tackling completion of the task at hand; I quite like the inscrutable reward that comes from white-knuckling existence as if no second can be wasted. It sounds like Open Head does too.