Headcheese

Reviews

Headcheese Expired LP

There is not much (if anything) to dislike about Expired, the new LP from the Kamloops, B.C. quartet HEADCHEESE. Upon first listen, I needed to stop what I was doing and devote all of my usually non-existent attention to the situation at hand. Each track gets more antagonizing and tightly wound, sounding eerily like VOID if they had been produced by Spot. The band is new to me, but from what little I have gathered, they are bound by family ties between two members, come from a small river town riddled with wildlife, and even opened for D.O.A.?  This tops my year-end list for sure. Keep going HEADCHEESE, you rule.

Headcheese Demo 2022 cassette

Kamloops’s HEADCHEESE is planning an LP, but in the meantime, we get this unhinged little demo. The band swings back and forth between sounding playful and pissed as they run through four speedy tracks of schizophrenic hardcore. These beefy tunes are centered around start/stop dynamics and often drop into spats of sparse, jerky instrumentation, not unlike the CONTORTIONS. If you like ‘em heavy and weird, this one’s for you. There’s a great hoe-down-style song called “Loss Prevention” on here, too.

Headcheese Headcheese LP

British Columbia combo containing BOOTLICKER alumni rattle out twelve songs in twelve minutes and rarely if ever drop the tempo for this, their first vinyl outing. HEADCHEESE has a pretty big streak of garage punk in their hardcore, though, twin guitars both sounding scrawny and tinny (in a cool way). Reminds me of the SPITS here and there, early BLACK FLAG in certain respects, ANGRY SAMOANS for the insouciance… BLOODY HAMMER from late-’00s Texas had a really similar vibe for their short existence, I’d say. Lyrics, sang and I think written by Lewis Podlubny, lean heavily on the loser-punk burnout anthems but throw in some anti-police sentiment (I like the framing of this one: that’s cool your officer dad is nice to you, but he’s still a cop) and a sardonic love letter to Google Home.