Head Wound City [Single, EP]

Head Wound City | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 21, 2005)
• Original Release Date: 2005
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Single, EP
• Label: Three-One-G
• ASIN: B000BJS8E0
• Also Available in: Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #270,207 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome, November 27, 2006

By 

Matt Loberg "Shunk Wuggah" (Scottsdale, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Head Wound City (Audio CD)

This album is great. This guy a few spaces above me who bothered to write a 3 paragraph review of [...] knows nothing. Yes, this is thrash. Let's look at the small timeline: Mark McCoy, who is in one of the best thrash bands ever that being Charles Bronson, later moved on to Holy Molar and The Oath, which played shows or were friends with The Locust. The drummer of The locust was also in Holy Molar. There are people in The Locust that are in Head Wound City. In other words, YES, HWC is Thrash, but not "thrash-metal" like everyone is used to hearing, they are "thrashcore" as we call it. So there you have it. All the songs on HWC's album are awesome, they are really fast, there's plenty of screaming, and it's just full of wonderful amounts of energy. Get this if you like The Oath, Charles Bronson, The Locust, Holy Molar, and anything else related to thrash/technopunk. I give it a 5 because I enjoy HWC and they rule. End of story.

2.0 out of 5 stars Uh...I don't get it, August 21, 2010

By 

A. Stutheit "Teyad" (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Head Wound City (Audio CD)

Head Wound City clearly had one goal in mind when making their debut: To make some of the fastest, rawest, and most chaotic, crushing, technically deranged, and all-around extreme music ever put to wax. Unfortunately, the end result was instead something that failed to be anything exceptional, but is in fact pretty bad, and at times even borders on sounding almost laughable. (And with seven strangely named tracks clocking in at a grand total of less than ten minutes in length, one has to wonder if HWC were meant to be a joke. If nothing else, it at least sheds lite on the alleged story that the idea for the band came up in a drunken stupor.) Sure, HWC had potential -- and lots of it. It is, after all, a noisegrind/thrashcore supergroup; and these five musicians are fairly successful and well-respected with their respective other projects. It's broken down into vocalist/lyricist Jordan Blilie, and guitar player Cody Votolato (both of whom have background in post-hardcore, as they were apart of The Blood Brothers); lead guitarist Nick Zinner (who is also a member of the popular indie-rock group Yeah Yeah Yeahs); and Justin Pearson (bass), and drummer/percussionist Gabe Serbian (both of whom gained fame by playing with noise-rockers Holy Molar and influential cyber-grind/powerviolence quartet The Locust). But there's something about this 2005 EP that doesn't click. For one thing, very technical and dizzyingly fast math-y grindcore like this just isn't all that uncommon (or unique and powerful) anymore. Converge, Today Is The Day, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Unexpect, and Spastic Ink (to name only a few) have been doing it (and doing it better) for quite some time now. There are tons of those types of bands that have formed this side of the year 2000, too, including Psyopus, Behold The Arctopus, Daughters, Between The Buried And Me, and Swarm Of The Lotus. Unoriginality is a serious flaw, but even with that aside, the album is still nothing special. No matter how many times it is spun, it simply does not leave the tiniest of dents on the listener's head. The poor production job makes the music stay in such a small and tight sonic box that the guitars usually have no choice but to form just an unremarkable, muddied-sounding blur of noise. Also, Gabe is definitely a very skilled skinsman, and his drumming is the best thing heard, here; but even it could stand to be a bit better. Thanks to a click-y, programmed-esque drum sound and Gabe's rapid-fire style of playing, the drumming is often (if not always) sounds kind of like an annoying popcorn popper, and is not nearly as thunderous or powerful as it should be. As such, this recording is like a devastatingly huge, ticking time bomb that never actually goes go off. And finally, the music is really bizarre, and its speed is blazing, but as such, none -- and I mean NONE -- of the songs stay with you after they're done playing. Plus, one would also be hard pressed to find many parts to songs (i.e. guitar licks, breakdowns, lyrics, catchy parts, etc.) that stand out. To be fair, this seven-song, ten-minute-long set is a moderately impressive display of technicality (it takes fairly skilled surgeons to craft constantly stopping-and-starting rhythms like these). And, yes, granted, there are a few decent moments in most songs. For example, check out the squealing, Eyehategod-esque guitar feedback in the intro of "Radical Friends," before it segues into up-tempo territory while Gabe hammers away at his trapkit and creates deft, cracking blast beats; the jackhammer-insistence, thrashing guitars, and steady bass bottom of "Rick Class"; the traditional breakneck noisecore freakout of "New Soak For An Empty Pocket," which is the relative epic of the bunch, clocking in at a whole two-minutes and twenty-two seconds; and the blistering double bass propulsion interwoven with the smart, start-stop-on-a-dime-start rhythms of closer "Mickael J. Fox Featuring Gnarls In harge." However, even those attributes are negligible because the chance of them staying in memory for more than, say, five minutes, is unlikely. All in all, somewhere down the line, Head Wound City could definitely write a great piece of math-influenced grindcore that is competitive with that of the genre's biggest stars. But this dull and highly skippable first effort sure ain't it.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A different feel on an old sound by classically trained noise musicians, February 28, 2007

By 

Sebastian H. Paramo "Sebastian" (Garland, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Head Wound City (Audio CD)

the experience of the members emmanates from their sound and Whitney's voice lend in some texture to the sound.

It's a beautiful blend of all these guys talents that come welded together from The Locust and The Blood Brothers and gives you a lot of respect for their talent in sound and lyrics.