Headdress’s second album Lunes has merely five tracks, but it would have been fine, even cool, if they’d gone with a single Dopesmoker-esque song. This is not to say that one desert-drone-rock song is indistinguishable from another. Rather, the careful, pulsating fuzz that emanates (I think) from organist Ethan Cook hovers consistently throughout the record, creating a kind of lulling unity that ties the record together. On several tracks, particularly in the opening of the 10-minute long closer “The End,” Caleb Coy’s guitar is almost identical to Cook’s organ, which imbues the song with a clever confusion, a nice in-your-skull sensation.
A first glance at the Eastern (or is it Native American)-esque fractal on the album cover affirms that Headdress travel a well-trod canyon trail, somewhere between the ethereal sprawl of the first couple Brightblack Morninglight records and the Americana doom of Earth’s The Bees Made Honey In the Lion’s Skull. A couple of the songs on Lunes are pure distortion and delay pedal exercises, while others have Coy playing familiar, if not actually recycled, blues/stoner riffs through an escalating storm of… well, delay and distortion.
Lunes definitely should be played loud, and will serve as fine fodder for fans of the meditative heavy. Like many of their neo-psych peers, Headdress play smartly and competently; if largely unoriginal, their sound is inviting.
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