VIOLENT HEADACHE
CDr (Demo 1992)
PRESS / REVIEWS
Reviewed on HEATHEN HARVEST
http://www.heathenharvest.com/
From Barcelona in Spain comes Violent Headache, a band with a long, and at least in my book, quite obscure history. Therapy of Noise is another release from the house of R.O.N.F. Records who I have quite a gruelling respect for, not everything the release are up my sleeve but at least they do their thing and take no crap. The music of Violent Headache can be described as a rabid mix of punk with its abuse of a few good chords for each song and its in your face political message, some kind of grindcore with relentless growlings, rabid guitars and a pure primal aggression as well as the samplings that add all the mysterious sounds used to add flavour or even insanity to each tracks. The album have lots of songs but each song is seldom over 2 minutes long so it is not always easy to go with the flow of each particular song. You could say you are allowed to get a small taste of the sound before the songs switches and more or less changes style and variety.
The use of sampling are quite obvious with a huge mix of different sources such as speeches from the second world war, a goat and a women speaking about some kind of experimentation I believe. Overall it works well but since a few of the songs are so short you really don’t get the point of the long intros, it is not that much of a bother but still manage to steal some of the show. The guitars are a mangling orchestra of pure cyanide, the vocals sounds like something produced from the thorn throat of a grizzly bear and the percussion is a barrage of blasts and mangling of metal. Overall I like the music, its primitive and pretty nasty grindcore with lots of aggression baked into it. However it lacks somewhat in inspiration, most of the songs just collide with each other and should I put the album on shuffle the songs without a distinct sampling in the beginning would easily get lost amongst each other. I am not looking for some over the top progressive music here but still somewhere variation would have been good, especially since the songs tend to be short.
Overall Therapy of Noise is not a bad album, it is more or less a hybrid of a political statement from the golden age of punk, a noisy and brutal in your face act of defiance. I can really appreciate the finer parts of the album as well as the grittier parts but when it comes to the composition it feels like it is not a complete hit. For a rerelease of a old demo it is not much to expect however and I am really intrigued to see what direction this band have taken since this album was first released.
