Bloody Head have been lurking at the fringes for some ten years now, occupying a greasy, hard-to-clean crevice where noise-rock and psychedelia begin to intermingle. In this time they’ve tottered, threatened, collapsed and cajoled, their unexpected incursions akin to having a mysterious, slightly cracked ‘character’ glom onto you at the pub. Like said pub weirdo, they charm and bemuse and recount tall tales, all while a violent sense of mania flickers intermittently behind the eyes.
Bend Down And Kiss The Ground comes hot on the heels of last year’s excellent Perpetual Eden, and hews close to that album’s rangier, slightly-more-streamlined sound. Things remain ugly and warped, but they’re keeping up their attempts at sprucing and spritzing: submitting themselves to the occasional quick dunk in a turps bath, perhaps, or ill-fatedly attempting to remove warts with a belt sander.
Like something crafted by occult forces, the album has been divided into four parts, each of which operate distinctly while at the same time proving integral to the machinations of the others. ‘Children Of The Dusk’ channels a Hawkwind-blasted version of The Stooges, its primal, swaggering Ron Asheton riff giving way to cheeky, Kyuss-esque wobbles. The title track, meanwhile, builds itself around a series of gristly crunches, channelling the murky ill intent of No Balls, Drunks With Guns and early Melvins, and the instrumental ‘Vibratory Affinity’ brings to mind a gluey, Ennio Morricone fever dream, had the composer chosen to trade in The Eternal City for a clammy-walled Nottingham bedsit.
Closing track Time, ‘As Veiled Eternity’ makes good on the promise-cum-threat of its title by seemingly turning its 13-minute runtime into a blighted, nerve-jangling aeon. Clumps of sodden riff honk endlessly, vulgar rending noises occur and arcane bass structures somehow bring to mind the more labyrinthine works of Man Is The Bastard. It also has a contemplative side, but rather than allowing space to breathe you instead spend the downtime vaguely worrying about just what is being contemplated.
For all the seaminess, all the noise and all the general unwholesomeness, Bend Down And Kiss The Ground is far from repellant. The band are clearly working within their own special set of rules, but they’re not unwelcoming about it. Like Loop, or The Bevis Frond or The Fall there’s an insular sort of world-building at play, albeit one where the door’s been left on the latch. This means that we mere passersby can, for a short time at least, glimpse in at a strange and uncanny place where the esoteric and the everyday combine – like reading The Golden Bough on the night bus while at the same time trying desperately not to be sick.
