CCR Headcleaner

CCR Headcleaner

Cleaner

Orphan Age Records

***After birthing Street Riffs, their hi-definition, hi-energy, statement from 2020, CCR Headcleaner turned inward. The retreat from the pro-studio to the home studio was partially by design and partially decided by global events. Cleaner is very much a pandemic album, more of a homespun head trip than its predecessors. At the same time guitarist, songwriter and spiritual center of the group, Lacey Emmanuel, left the Bay for the shores of Lake Michigan. By most accounts an apocalyptic live-band became by and large a home recording animal. This is most apparent when Headcleaner turns up the balladry. “Don’t Feel the End” is a proto-metal campfire anthem, and “Everyday” hovers somewhere between keyboard misfit John Bender and the White Album. Make no mistake, the record will still be filed under “Punk” at your local record shop. It kicks off with “the brining pt. 2” the hottest slice of Funhouse free-rock that the band has committed to record. “Too Much” gives us its jail abolition rap over a two chord hardcore stomp. In a town (San Francisco) that is experiencing something of a DIY pop renaissance, Headcleaner has always fought to establish the fact that they have actual songs. This is no 70s throwback, but instead an attempt to up the ante. Without all the rock histrionics, technical arrogance and misogyny can the rock riff deliver on its ultimate promise: heavy music for total liberation. All tracks were mixed and lovingly fucked with by none other than Eric Bauer at his Bauer Mansion...

CCR Headcleaner

Street Riffs

In The Red

“The Bay Area in 2019 is a fucked up place. I’m living in the shadow of brand new tech tower nursing my beer at the horseshoe bar of Jonell’s, the last of the great TL haunts. I stumbled here past numerous encampments of tired souls driven to the streets by the same people who walk by everyday with brand new air pods and upturned noses, actively disdainful of the people whose problems they have helped create. Despite my disenchantment I can’t shake the ringing in my ears from blasting tunes in my SRO... “Street Riffs, the new album from a band called CCR Headcleaner, who I figured—like everyone else—had left the Bay long ago for greener pastures, maybe somewhere like LA…it turns out these mutants have been slugging it out, trudging through the gutters of the Bay Area since I first heard of them. The live shows were legendary. Fire, walls of noise, Tom Petty covers, guitars played with machetes, acid fueled freakouts, sweaty basement shows and big venue blowouts. Borrowed gear on borrowed time. I even heard the guitar player burned the merch money handed to them in front of a bright eyed young fan who had just purchased the record. “So the cover of Street Riffs, crowded with cranes and construction really conveys the claustrophobic catastrophe of modern city living. And the music! Brash frenetic riffs and primordial thundering rhythms weave in and out of ethereal melodies in a surprising amalgamation of experimental underground and working peoples rock...

CCR Headcleaner

Tear Down The Wall

In The Red

“I’d seen CCR Headcleaner several times before, usually an entertaining mess of fucked-up rock racket that emerged from the ashes of a Georgia band I liked called Long Legged Woman. But at their Hemlock show opening for Human Eye back in September, CCR somehow transmuted themselves from an unevenly good local band into a marauding gang of Scanners-style head-exploder telepaths and delivered a defining, transcendent, next-level performance. CCR’s hypnotic and malevolent psychedelia wasn’t faux-fun party-psych or disingenuously mellow Zen Center nature psych—it was more of a Jim Thompson’s Killer Inside Me psych with elective self-surgery K-hole romps and post-hate-fuck cuddle balladry. The band was possessed, the room was juiced, the audience transfixed. At points, CCR’s set was suffused with a prosaic evil vibe that reminded me of the Rembrandt Pussyhorse / Locust Abortion-era Butthole Surfers live shows. Musically, CCR are way different than the Buttholes—I’m referring more to the air of all-pervading cathartic menace. Shortly afterward, CCR went with Fuzz on a national tour (huge props to Fuzz for that act of public service) and I caught them a month later at Death By Audio in Brooklyn. They were in top road shape, which only underscored how special that show with Human Eye had been.” —Anthony Bedard, Bay Bridged   “The perfect amounts of confused clatter, slurred lines and parts where everyone headbangs at the same time, all while dipping toes deep into thrash, psychedelia and clinging onto the American rock ’n’ roll dreams of the sixties.” —Marissa Magic,...