A night with Hammerhead 2021
Hey old friend, old noise, sandpaper and bug in the eye bat in the hair we cometh full circle in culted city am-rep city. Those built-for-the-night killer amps have been used, used and used last visit was mid 90s not sober and quite crooked and pill shovels everywhere lookin’ at black walls and an 8 foot ceiling drippin’ sweat and riffs retro new Unicorn-old sounds 2021. Hammerhead walkin’ and talkin’ a bit sonically faster death-kind doula Thurston Moore. Sonic Youth-like movement victim of gravity and heavy indie rock ala Husker Du. Wish the show was at CBGB intimate and shoulda been louder. Release-the-dogs-imagery reunion shows are always mild and end not-so-late and the audience is made up of what looks like record store employees and their partners, Cherubs reunion shows too.
Enter-the-zone raw simplicity great art not for the ruling class but for the workingman’s weekend and steam and making memories brain damage skin skull with friends we should have a couple before we leave the house live on the drive both ways, tacos and booze drinking from the serpent’s chalice. Interaction with the music art a head bob and a knee jerk and maybe some lyrics you know the patterns and unwritten rules of the late night bar show don’t fall over don’t invade people space cause it’s occupied by the enemy sometimes or else queens’ veins of iron or peasants and jokers and the thieves.
The rolling system of an anti-book-burner band Hammerhead sound is repetition, a religiousness of artistic intuition floating Vatican V fight fire with fire above the abyss and feeling a soft depth of God told me to… – God is dead and buddhas are my guns they say and they just kept playing poetics and creation and air destruction through just-a-vessel musical instruments and vocals and some visual brushstrokes weightlessness ascent or lefty-ringo left hand path descent of soundwaves fast and dissonant and yelling and time made dynamic 2-high cactus stings lovin’ teenage fires.
Watching the show, the listening and seeing Bermuda-triangle-melody experience is heightened and speech-impelled-to-purify is diminished. Some leave the room in all its intensity like a High on Fire show in a small room see you down the road time travel Into The Vortex circa 1994. Saddle up four horsemen shrunken head rock ‘n’ roll galaxy journey to the center of the flying V riff got me blind with aces…