When this album was released way back when, in 1996, it was at a moment when electronic music of all sorts was riding high in the charts and otherwise, and stoner rock riffage as produced by a hirsute quartet from Bristol somehow became buried in a slew of trip-hop releases which were apparently satisfying the attention-spans of dope-smokers everywhere. Meanwhile, guitar rock seemed to have been hijacked for not only chart purposes, but mystifyingly, indie fashion, by the wholly disappointing surge of retro-Kinks and Beatles copyists whose names need not be mentioned. But The Heads kept doggedly on with their revivalist programme of MC5 and Hawkwind appreciation, eventually and most notably being hailed as long-lived champions of the heavy guitar at Portishead‘s surprisingly metal and doom-laden All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in December 2007.
Remastered and expanded, their début album Relaxing With … comes now as a double-disc set, the first being the original CD as released the first time round. Opening with the well-used gambit of sampling a stereo test-tone record, The Heads lay out their psychedelic credentials with a blast of feedback and squittering analogue synth, before heaving into the sort of riff which the Pink Fairies would wholeheartedly approve. Combined with lyrics droned out with the intense displaced affect of someone whose brain is floating in a cloud of smoke with notions of space-time at the forefront, “Quad” is as good an introduction to the band’s freakout style as one could demand, at once tightly-wound and loose-limbed in its onward tumble of churning guitars and throbbing bass. From this point on, it’s easy to tick off the influences – MC5 attitude (and also, on the bonus disc, a cover of their “Looking at You”), Stooges energy, Spacemen 3 distracted repetition, Loop-ish skullscraping chords, and so on into the heart of the wah; but it’s also clear that The Heads have their own agenda, one in which being at the eye of a salad light under strobes ramped up to dangerous levels while the Marshalls shift heavy air is the be all and possibly end-all of their raison d’être.
The bonus disc holds not only their complete Peel Session but also chunks of other radio recordings, with a particularly snarling take of the ranting “Television” from the album (also presented in its 7″ version), wherein the love-hate relationship of those too fried to move their attention from Carrie Fisher on the gogglebox is captured with the despairing recognition that ennui has its attractions, and an equally thrash-speed rendition of “Widowmaker,” the guitars swerving and diving across a brain-bashing bassline, marking a couple of highlights of the extras. But best of all are the somewhat murky demo version of the defining Heads crowd-pleaser, “Spliff Riff” (as clear a statement of intent as a track title could possibly be) and its beefed-up Peel Session. Where the former is a triumph of lo-fi fuzzwah and muffled metronomic intensity, the latter pulses with hypnotic gravitas, the difference a few years of pounding out their signature splurge and a quality BBC recording makes is like shifting musical gears and injecting the nitrous, lifting the eponymous riff into the dope clouds on a nine-minute carousel ride of the tripped-out Magic Roundabout kind.
-Linus Tossio-
