For many years, I waited in vain for The Heads to unleash a new, perfectly formed psychedelic masterpiece to rival their ‘Under Sided’ album from 2002, feeling routinely disappointed each time I picked up a new disc by them to find it filled with murky practice room jams.

Then I realised I’d been wasting my time. Rule # 1 of appreciating Bristol’s finest fuzz warriors is to realise they ARE those murky practice room jams, and to learn to love them for that, greeting all their output with the same idiot grin that a dedicated ‘Deadhead greets each new tour bootleg.

‘Psychedelic’ though they may be, cosmic transcendentalism and oneiric visions of Eastern splendour are not exactly The Heads’ bag. Theirs is a psychedelia of black-walled basements plastered with random bits of gaffa tape; of over-flowing ashtrays and never-ending cans of Red Stripe; of petrol fumes, melted 9V batteries and dubious smelling amp cabinets that you will no doubt have to carry up a fire escape at some point. Insofar as their records can be said to represent any aesthetic at all, they represent the craft and physical stresses that goes into actually making music like this in the first place.

No bullshit whatsoever from these guys – their creative process, random as it may be, is front and centre for all to see, most likely captured via a couple of roughly placed mics plugged into some portable four track in the corner of wherever the hell they’ve convened to work out a few riffs after work, and the results speak for themselves vis-a-vis their consistently high levels of scuzzy, head-wrecking brilliance.

Despite its status as an self-acknowledged ‘odds & sods’ collection from a band who deal almost exclusively in odds & sods collections, ‘Time in Space’ is actually one of their most varied and rewarding collections of such material to date. Culled from “studio outtakes, rehearsal takes, radio sessions and live recordings”, it’s a little bit like The Heads’ equivalent of Can’s ‘Lost Tapes’ perhaps, and verily, highlights abound.

The following come straight from my notes after I played both discs today:

‘Long Gone Live’ on Side # 2:, splattered noise jam of warped tremolo fuzz and knob-twisting, gradually acquires a weighty head-nodding rhythm before collapsing back into animalistic abstraction and duelling wah-wah laser blasts.

‘31st’ – a flattening, no nonsense riff rocker, up there with the band’s best.

‘World of Keys’ on Side # 3 starts off uncharacteristically with a brutal, lumbering fuzz organ / drums thing, like Satelliti or early Oneida or something, before ‘Coming Round’ is classic Heads gear, sounding like Mark E. Smith fronted Loop?!

‘Steak & Riffney Pie’, opening Side # 4, is just CLASS – an appropriately named rampage of head-banging stoner perfection, saved from collapse into the sludge-lake by some admirably enervated drumming.

And so on. You get the idea, I’m sure. Well over half the tracks here are gifted with in-jokey/self-descriptive titles that sound like they’ve been scribbled on a tape inlay card or file name as reminders for the next practice (‘Backwards Doom’, ‘DAD GAD’, ‘Poppy’), and there are, inevitably, some bits of self-indulgent weirdness that some may argue might have been best left in the drawer.

‘Bemmie Underwater’ for instance sounds suspiciously like the track ‘Return of the Bemmie’ from the ‘Under The Stress of a Headlong Dive’ album fed through some cheesy sounding phaser, but if you ask me, even the silliest bits here function as grist to the mill of The Heads overall epic/squalid vision, as demonstrated when even the aforementioned track starts to sound pleasantly demented once someone lets off a ripping (un-filtered) solo over the top of it as the effect on the backing track is ratcheted up into dub-like abstraction.

In short, there is nothing revelatory hidden within the grooves of ‘Time in Space’ to explain to the uninitiated why fans of this band continue to clamber over the prone bodies of their fellows to nab discs like this from merch stalls, or besiege online retailers in much the same manner, but.. what can you say, really? Basically this is just a load more of The Heads doing what they do, and by this stage in the game, if you’re in, you’re in, with no further explanation needed.

The old Heads website appears to be dead. They have a facebook page, and a bandcamp with a few random bits and pieces from their extensive catalogue. Rooster Records (operated by the band) has no web presence. Some UK shops & distros appear to still have copies of ‘Time in Space’ at the time of writing.

Labels: best of 2015, The Heads