“Super Group” is a misleading term. It makes you believe that the group is, in fact, super human. You may think the members of Head Wound City are able to lift busses with their pinkies or melt steel with their bellybuttons; but quite the opposite is true. Head Wound City are able to lift your ass from your chair and melt your ears with their blaring, frantic, super hardcore/thrash/grind/what-have-you.
Head Wound City is comprised of members from The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and The Avengers or as I like to call them- the Blood Brothers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Locust. Jordan Blilie’s unmistakable, hard to discern yelping fronts this five piece group who created their 9 minute and 44 second self-titled EP in seven days. This doozy took five days to write and two days to record in Seattle, WA. The time constraint was a definite factor on the style and complexity of the music. But seriously, who could create a symphonic master piece filled with layers upon layers of crescendos and other fancy classical-music terms in five days? Only Superman, but he wasn’t available that week.
Like most good things, the idea of the band came to be through the consumption of alcohol, which led to drunk dialing. While most drunk dialing leads to calling ex-lovers and embarrassment, this dial started a chain reaction of sober phone calls which soon resulted in the EP I am banging my head to right now.
Head Wound City also includes Blilie’s Blood Brother band mate Cody Votolato on guitar, Locust band buds Gabe Serbian and Justin Pearson rounding out the percussion section, and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar. Pearson also owns and operates Three One G records which is the label this debut EP was released on, and also plays bass in Some Girls (and The Locust). This leads me to ask three questions. 1- Does everything Justin Pearson have a hand in become great? 2- Will any music Justin Pearson has a hand in ever last more than 15 minutes? 3- When will Nick Zinner stop collaborating on side projects (Head Wound City, guitar on Bright Eyes’ ‘Digital Ash in a Digital Urn’) and work on a new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s album already? Just sit on that and ponder with me, we’ll discuss that another time.
Article comments
1 - Chris Beaumont
Love the band name, but I doubt I'd like the music. I saw The Locust once live, and found them to be absolutely awful. Worst live band, worst music, I was insulted as a music fan, especially one that is generally easy to please in the rock realm. They are one act I would prefer to never see again. This is, in no way, meant to be offensive to fans of the band, they just aren't for me.