Demon Head
Thunder On The Fields
(The Sign Records)
There’s something in the air. A retro-craze has ushered itself onto our dimensional plain. Frankly, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Denmark’s Demon Head is a doom metal and hard rock band with a penchant towards the dark and psychedelic. The band is sharp with stressing syllables, angular riffs and chorus’s both demonic and swirling. There’s a charm to these guys: a unique little unilateralism. Mostly, the band rocks with a soul, and when things space out, you can really get a sense of environment.
The group’s latest slab of naturalism, Thunder On The Fields, gathers itself in earnest, playing with retraction and offering pure forms. When the band does extend, it does so with taste, and this allows for a maximization of expression. Not every band holds their best angles with such restraint.
Demon Head has the ability to shape compositions in a blocking and cut-up way—they offer no mysteries, and this is a really cool admission. The proto-metal of the ‘70s often had a magic that was widely apparent—a directness that was calculated. Demon Head share some of those sensibilities, but their magic bursts in strange places. The doom they jam is a strange one. And this is good. It’s almost avant-garde.
“Hic Svnt Dracones” is all existential and pure, a driving and riff centered sphere with a deep brain. Sections run long and earthy, and you’re put to a trance in an artful way. “Gallows Omen” is dark and slow, every penetrating chorus particular, wavy and circular. There’s openness and an airy sensibility “Untune The Sky”—the record’s closer—is geometric and organic, the breaks all chimes and lofty. Vocalist Ferreira Larsen is direct, particular and unique. His vision carries the totality of the group.
Demon Head are all fields, wild mountains and trees. They’re dark too. But it’s a darkness that’s different—old and timeless and sort of difficult to grasp. The band’s best trait is its way of accenting extensions: they never quite give you what you expect, and this keeps things loose and original. When playing music that sounds like it was recorded forty years ago, this is a crucial technique. That’s what Demon Head succeed: they bend to no genre—they just love to dream.
