The Heads Post “It’s About Time… and Space” Video
UK heavy psych institution The Heads release their new 2LP, yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell — also listed as ‘volumeone,’ implying more to follow — on March 27 through Rooster Rock. The band’s own Simon Price (guitar, keys, vocals; aka kandodo) put together the video below for the side-B-consuming “It’s About Time… And Space,” which by more than 10 minutes is the longest song on any of the four-sides. The Heads are no strangers to longform jamming — they released the 7LP collection Reverberations last year on Rooster Rock/Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube — and generally speaking seem by now to be entirely more comfortable in a universe that’s melting with lysergic color, is grainy like an old VHS, and didn’t give a crap before not giving a crap was cool.
This dimension indeed is about both time and space, and noise, and exploration, but that would probably be too long for a title. And as a sampling of what The Heads do, you can’t say it isn’t substantial, even if it doesn’t account for the neo-mod “Hits Like a Dove” at the outset or the warped garage rock of “Cardinal Fuzz,” the meditative organ, drone, guitar and vocal aside “Entropic Dissolution,” or “Sunquaker,” which sounds half like a Hendrix bootleg copied from cassette to cassette to cassette, propagating salvation-via-wah with nary a thought for the powdered brainmatter left behind. And so on.
That is to say, as much as The Heads go, they’re rarely actually ending up in the same place, and with 12 songs and 78 minutes of material, “Sunquaker” and the subsequent “Socially Awkward” can both have a reach without overlapping, the latter’s languid bassline is joined by vague vocal echoes and a sense that the whole song is breathing. This is divergent from the space-rock push of “Can’t Stop the Bleeding” earlier on, which swirls itself into oblivion and back out again, and a fuzzblast rocknroller like “On,” but that’s the point. It’s not about finding an identity and dwelling in it so much as taking all your processes, cutting them into tiny pieces with magical scissors and throwing them in the air to reorder them.
“On” struts into its second half and splits off into drone, with “Snake Oil” picking up with four minutes that sounds improvised if it wasn’t, setting up that shift for “Sunquaker,” but whether it’s “It’s About Time… And Space,” or the 1:46 cosmic-noise punkgaze of “Bullets Fly but No Bees,” leading into closing duo “It’s All Over Now Sunshine” — true. — and the companionable march into distortion in “Off,” The Heads make each turn sound like the discovery of new ground, when really what they’re doing is tapping into their own decades of psychmaking and influences within and without the molten end of music. They’re The Heads. They’ve mastered this thing that is being The Heads, even as they’ve made the definition more amorphous with time.
So yes, in part, it’s about time. It’s also about space, and whether you’re talking daytrips to the accretion disk of Saggitarious A* or just the in-room feeling of the rumbling, building second half of “Can’t Stop the Rushing,” that remains true. But time and space are also the same thing — spacetime — and so just as the gaze of one piece here bleeds into another, so too do universes twist in time with the songs. Whether they ultimately do another ‘volume’ or they don’t, yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell offers mindbending excursions for those willing to have their minds duly bent. It won’t be everybody. It never has been. But if you can get to this, can really meet it on its own level, I’m fairly sure you can register with your municipality as an acid shaman, and depending on where you live I think that comes with a stipend. Kudos.
The video for “It’s About Time… And Space,” follows here, with the album stream closer to the bottom of the post. Album is out March 27.
Please enjoy:
The Heads, “It’s About Time… And Space” official video
The Heads release new SINGLE, the side long epic “Its about time…and space”. Simon Price has put some visuals together.
It’s taken from their forthcoming opus “yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell” due on March 27th via Rooster Records / FMD.
Buy links: https://www.arcade-sound.com/products/the-heads-yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell-2lp-cd
…it’s also going to be available as a Dinked Edition special vinyl package…
https://dinkededition.co.uk/editions/the-heads-yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell
recorded/Joe Garcia in Bristol
mixed/produced/mastered/John McBain in San Francisco and Portland
artwork/Simon Price/Craig Cornock
The Heads are:
Paul Allen /guitars/vocals/mellotron
Wayne Maskell /drums
H O Morgan /bass
Simon Price /guitars/vocals/keyboards
