Hexham Heads may be the perfect soundtrack for your favorite dark horror-thriller, whose darkness is rebounded by just enough energy and aggressiveness in the delivery to make you think you are not the victim but the chaser in the movie.
The quartet was playing at Club Moscow, an semi-open air courtyard at Hollywood Boardner’s where live bands play every Wednesdays. They looked very serious and focused while playing their punk-with-a-goth-and creepy-side music, going into a lot of distortion, holding the sinister tone all the time, even when three of them were contributing to the vocals.
Their guitars were like thunder, the vocals had swagger and belligerence in their delivery, and their songs were often venturing into a gloomy and a sort of cold psychedelia with some My-Bloody-Valentine-meets-The-Cure-meets-Joy-Division-meets-the-Cramps (and probably many others) accents at various times of their set.
Their sound was layered and thick thanks to the attack mode of Lukas Judge’s lead guitar, Ken Ramos’ shattering guitar and morose vocals, Melissa Pleckham’s dark bass lines, and Jeff Cohlman’s sludgy drumming.
I am not too sure how to exactly qualify their foggy hard rocking sound, but every time, you could hear a melody escaping from the fuzziness, and the last songs seemed to be a little sunnier, with even a Cure vibe, appearing like a ghost through the songs.
I had seen them once before, almost a year ago, and despite the fact I have seen quite a few bands live since, their dense and droning sound had stuck with me, which is certainly not always the case!
They don’t seem to have put a lot of music on their bandcamp yet (http://hexhamheads.bandcamp.com/track/you-make-me-feel-like-a-ghost-2), but there is this song whose title, ‘You make me feel like a ghost’, is totally matching their soundscape; but reading from the setlist (which was probably only showing abbreviated titles), this would also apply to the other songs: ‘Rats’, ‘Freezing’, or ‘She never died’.