Closing out the misery of 2023 with a flourish, those jolly little elves at Wrong Speed Records had Perpetual Eden up for pre-order on the first day of advent and, being skilled in the dying art of parcel delivery, got it out to the hardcore in time for Christmas. In the vague hope it might bring seasonal cheer, or see you through. Or something. To be honest, it isn’t really a Christmas record. It’s much more of a January record.
I mean it wasn’t exactly an all time great Christmas, and it might yet be our last, but the slow drift of the week was a comfort, the hideous world receding behind a warm blur of TV and drink. On new year’s day I went out for a walk. The light was thin, a gray blanket of cloud covered the sodden earth. No one was about, scarcely even birds. 2024 is here and everything’s just going to get worse. The new year does not herald a new you. You’re the same disappointing, self defeating idiot you always were. Bloody Head‘s bad vibe dirge punk makes a perfect soundtrack.
The album’s beautiful cover contrasts a vivid natural world with grimy industrial decay in cut-up imagery recalling Gee Vaucher’s art for Crass. In a further anarcho-punk echo there’s a band made fanzine included. The first song, ‘There Is No Authority But Yourself… And Everyone Else’ undercuts the utopianism of Crass’s slogan with the grinding overwhelm of the everyday. But doesn’t entirely reject it. On the back a blown out photocopy of teenage skinheads doing glue gives a good sense of the low rent chemical sting of their sound.
Lethal punk rock ripper ‘Sid + Gary’ is a terse celebration of getting mashed up on acid and pills. Or transcendence through sensory derangement, my dears. Bloody Head may be more Arthur, than Penny, Rimbaud. Probably equal parts psych and punk in their filthy noise soup too. While everything here is deliciously overloaded and discordant and all that other good stuff, it isn’t that abject one note hate grind thing, there’s light and shade, sometimes even colours in the gloom. On ‘The Crooked Hinge’ they widen out and down tune to a doom crawl. The excellent ‘Occult Bother’ gets a fantastic elastic groove going as Dave Bevan pours scorn from a bucket. Dragging itself along with a broken leg ‘She Comes In 7’s’ brings us the splendid exclamation “Hare Krishna on a bike.”
While the dim view they take of the world can appear bleak or negative, it isn’t hopeless or depressing. Instead, it writhes with stubborn life, a primal determination to survive and thrive in spite of it all. At the record’s centre is ‘Unfold Yr Own Myth’ from which the title ‘Perpetual Eden’ comes. Running from a virtually pastoral opening section through a prettier drone rock incantation on iconoclasm and self realisation. “Let the temple collapse and the old symbols shatter, unfold your own myth, use your life like a dagger.” New year, same old shit, burn it down. Told you it was a January record.
