Lou Reed meets Mushroomhead is one way Per Wiberg’s mini collection of emotion bending, brain stirring tunes could be deciphered. Songs that need a few listens to truly understand everything that’s happening within, processing all effects and messages intended. Nuance and detail are used in fine tuned fashion, while the experience is like a slow heavy machine churning out sound, mixed together and dragged out slowly like a cigarette burning.
Head Without Eyes could have the Pink Floyd effect for this genre with a different kind of musical stimulus with songs poking ears with hypnotic and mesmerizing sounds.
Music doesn’t always have to sound heavy to be heavy as Wiberg unmistakably proves. For three decades he’s made necks move and mosh pits happen with loud instruments playing in an eclectic stew of Opeth, Spiritual Beggar’s and Candlemass among others.
With Head Without Eyes it’s time for a different kind of heavy, taking the spurs down a different path, stirring up emotions to uncomfortable levels with sounds haunting and harshly jagged to the ear while inviting the creepy, silent stranger into the room. What Johnny Cash created on “Ain’t No Grave,” Wiberg’s updated with his new offering.
Catchy hooks sink into haunting melodies with trippy sounds exploring the darker sides of music pulling forbidden sounds and carnal, esoteric knowledge out like finding a hidden book under the creaking floorboards of a haunted house.
Wiberg guides fingers over strings letting trapped souls moan and thrash their way to audible freedom. Screaming vocals, death growls and chugging riffs aren’t needed. Rather, laid back creepy corded notes made for scary stories and back porch flame lit tell all’s carry the songs in an assorted use of creative torment, created by seasoned hands from the seasoned abyss. A record that feels like a collection of assorted bones coming out of the closest whether from a personal victim wardrobe or projects hung and left to finish.
The lurking lore of “Let the Water take me Home’ opens as a cold chilling tale and a seriously involved piano riff with anxiety issues. Cold water blues story telling on the back porch. Oldschool vocals pour out withered words of experience. It’s a haunting and simplistic country vibe as keys make spiritual, supernatural footsteps. Like sweeping up in an old dusty mansion, cathedral notes hit echo tunnels stirring up souls as sounds of steam and smoke envelope the background resurrecting the room’s energy and memories with eerie heaviness and charred acoustic sounds.
‘Anywhere the Blood Flows’ is vintage surf rock, garage flavored, vibrating psychedelic strings, tripping on acid and any other assorted pills. Prog and fuzz unite creating a dramatic ‘70s chase scene vibe. The epic length tune as guitars resemble cackling laughter as the creepy musical odyssey plays along like a paranoia run in a forest at dusk.
The ghostly beautiful guest vocals of Billie Lindahl come from nowhere like a caressing rhythmic attack and wayward spirit wandering.
A second symbolic song ready to wash up red from the depths infested with human hunting teeth and blood thirsty appetites. It’s a horror movie screen play narrated by guitars, vocals and atmosphere with psychedelic shades of nightmares and tripping anxiety.
‘Pass on the Fear’ has feedback chomping away at the ground like stalking footsteps. Piano hits like revealing memory imprints of a crime noir told on rainy desolated streets where murder is the after dark currency. Shadows lurk in corridors as eerie noises cascade and pollute the air creepy and mesmerizing carrying a threat like unseen gloved hands reaching out to strike. Mental snuff acted out in the fog, disappearing before the light comes. Feedback rears its static scratching head. White noise mixed with murder music like a jerking projector, tripping through vintage memories.
‘Pile of Nothing’ is a brilliant dismal experience. Creepy, groggy and dislodged with a country bluegrass background and feel preaching the Old Testament fire, rage, hell and damnation washed down with snake oil and incense. Lindahl’s sinister and seductive vocals return soothing with baby doll sweetness, underlining a story of cosmic foul play and rapture, guitars slithering like maggots and snakes.
Prog mixed in a gnawing stew with jolting guitar notes. Chords like a static charge up the spine, ratting, jangling bones.
Head Without Eyes is an old-school audio experience for the senses with sounds transporting listeners back to the old west, late-century England, the back county-side and California’s wet lands. Its beautifully off kilter with undercurrents of doom and despair and heavy, without being heavy.
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