Edinburgh’s Birdhead have been around for a couple of years now, but Pleasure Centre is their full-length debut. Whilst it’s unlikely to gain much attention from those who like their music of a slightly gentler and less off-the-wall persuasion, Pleasure Centre could well see the pair get greater recognition as part of the UK’s burgeoning scene of noisemongers.
Opener ‘Tourist’ showcases much of what is great about Birdhead. Fundamentally it’s just a great tune. The vocals almost bring to mind a Scottish Mark E. Smith in their strained nonchalance and the guitar riff stabs in all the right places, making the track truly memorable. There’s almost a krautrockian slant to things as well in the hypnotic cyclical nature of the song, and many others on the album. The electronic elements are more of a sideshow than anything else but they do give Birdhead an extra edge to them that some of their more strictly guitar based contemporaries lack.
The only real problem with ‘Tourist’, in fact, is that it’s over five minutes long, which is a shade too much considering the idea contained within it. This is a problem that dogs much of Pleasure Centre. Even tracks like the three and a half minute ‘Inertia’ have a tendency to feel slightly overlong, as if they would be more effective if played slightly more aggressively and at a faster pace. What Birdhead do here they do well, but by the time ‘Belt’ comes along and closes the album you could be forgiven for thinking that the time to put another record on had more than come and gone.
This doesn’t make Pleasure Centre a failure by any stretch of the imagination but it’s certainly the case that the first half of the album is more successful than the second. For all the charm of later tracks like ‘Dronebone’ and ‘Trojan’, they do come across as slightly formulaic within the context of the album. Therefore, whilst this remains a promising debut, the follow-up will need to be leaner and more varied; a better debut than a record.
