Headdress, one of the classic records in the massive Sunburned Hand of The Man canon, is finally back on vinyl and sounding better than ever, thanks to Three Lobed Recordings.
Originally recorded across a trio of dates in 2001, this LP finds the band’s uncompromising music shifting from shape to shape, morphing wildly into new forms like an alien amoeba. One minute, frenzied angular guitar boogies charge out like ravenous beasts twisted with rickets. Then, a chorus of moans and throat singing accompany bird-like flutes and clanging kitchen utensil percussion the next. You never know where this brown acid trip is going to lead your ears next, but you know it’s always going to be fiercely primal and completely unlike anything else In your record collection.
The remastered sound here is phenomenal. The album’s crisp lo-fi atmosphere is still very much there, but it’s far more robust and three-dimensional. The overall production is both clear and yet still distinctly fuzzy, which keeps the music’s roughened edge fully intact (SHOTM’s music always needs a little bit of roughness). You truly feel as though you’re being fully immersed into the center a crazed ritual, with the band surrounding you in a great circle.
If you want to find out what SHOTM is all about, or if you want a listening experience that sounds like an attempt to either exorcise or posses your body with peyote-hungry party demons, then you just might need to get this 20th anniversary vinyl reissue from Three Lobed Recordings today!
-KH
Record Crates United 