***The dark road traveled by FAXED HEAD since the early 1990s was long thought to have dead-ended ages ago—but with the torn-from-the-headlines appearance of the recent “Vaxxed Head” 7" single, hopes are rising in the scattered and shattered Headheads around the world. Raise the roof a little higher: Exhumed at Birth, the long-lost 1997 debut album, is now seeing its first-ever vinyl release. And the remastered tracks sound incredible. Faxed Head are a part of an almost-lost current of protest music from the underground of thirty years ago. They presented as a band with features entirely obscured from view by crudely-made costumes showcasing their (allegedly disfigured) heads. Their post-hardcore music exploded into adjacent permutations of aggressive metallic rock and dimestore musique concrète. When they played live, the spectacle of it all was as intense as the music and their insane backstory—which inspired enclaves of enraptured freaks around the planet to declare them most supreme. By the time Exhumed at Birth was delivered, though, their story was almost over. Between 1992 and 1997, the band released five singles (many on Gregg Turkington’s Amarillo Records, home to Neil Hamburger and Secret Chiefs 3) and played around the Bay Area and Japan, introducing their decidedly outre approach to DIY metal. Their aliases—NECK HEAD, LaBREA TAR PITS HEAD, MCPATRICK HEAD, GRAPH HEAD and FIFTH HEAD—alongside track titles like “Pantera Lines” and the road-rubber wordplay of the songs on the Tire EP—indicated that something was rotten in Denmark. Of course it was! And lots of...
LP $21.95
06/10/2022
From Coalinga To Osaka documents the pride of Coalinga, CA in all their self-handicapped, brain-damaged glory. Beautifully shot on three cameras during Faxed Head's improbable 1995 tour of Japan, the live footage of this self-proclaimed "desk metal" quartet is interspersed with baffling but authentic footage of a Japanese junior high school class where the students are instructed on the subject of... Faxed Head! In addition to the electronics- and mayhem-heavy 1995 Osaka set, the DVD includes bonus live footage of a reconstituted (and much more metal-sounding) Faxed Head on tour in Canada in 2001. And, for the true fan, a 45-minute long hidden "Easter egg" showcases an entire concert by Faxed Head's long-time nemesis, pitiful Coalinga-area boogie-blues idiots The Bon Larvis Band. This strange and wonderful DVD is a surefire seller to fans of Mr. Bungle, Neil Hamburger, and Caroliner--all acts with which Faxed Head has long been associated, for reasons that are not clear. Faxed Head's devoted fan-base remains hungry for product, as health problems have prevented the band from any activity since 2001's Chiropractic CD. "From between the smiling, spilling oil derricks of Coalinga hobbles a severely damaged new extreme of metal. While most bands only play at looking to death for answers, the five 'desk metallers' in Faxed Head have already tasted the end, and have returned looking uncomfortably hideous and pathetic. Crippled, isolated and uneducated, these dedicated misfits have everything working against them.... His head a mottled morass of tangled hair and misshapen features, McPatrick Head roars like...
DVD $13.00
10/14/2008
***After a four-year hiatus from rehearsing, recording and performing, during which the members Faxed Head continued mental therapy at the Coalinga Youth Hospice and fought to overcome the ongoing physical and emotional exhaustion wrought by their failed 1991 suicide pact (and a continuing addiction to glue), they reunited to complete this new nine-song album. Their most ambitious recording to date, it is a particularly impressive document, since their advancing mental and physical deterioration leaves them with little ability to play or record. In addition to Chiropractic's startling use of sounds that don't exist in the arsenal of any other death metal outfit on Earth, it also provides perhaps the most intimate glimpse yet of what life is like for these unhappy residents of California's rural Central Valley. Lacking not just physical mobility, but also the quaint mythologies and cultural wellsprings that sustain their Nordic and Austrian counterparts, the Faxed Head are literal prisoners in a wilderness of fast food franchises and corrupt auto mechanics. Accordingly, Chiropractic is an all-grey kaleidoscope of depression, exploitation, sickness, isolation, intolerance, food poisoning, medical malpractice, and agricultural ruin. Early incarnations of the band appeared on limited pressing seven-inch records and compilations, material that was later compiled onto the full-length Uncomfortable But Free CD. After personnel changes, the band recorded the Exhumed at Birth CD (which Metal Maniacs magazine described as "a severely damaged new extreme of metal … a sick level of horror and mayhem"). Naturally, a brief tour of Australia followed.
CD $12.00
06/26/2001
MP3 $8.91
06/26/2001