Faxed Head Exhumed At Birth Vinyl LP 2022
1. I Saw Into the Grave Grave
2. Teachers
3. Exhumed at Birth – Have a Listen
4. Gore and Guts
5. House of Spirits
6. The Ancient Evil
7. Susurrus In Gloaming
8. Don’t Turn Out Like Me
9. The Sickroom of Delivery
10. Could Eckankar Help?
11. A Dream
12. Peregrinations From
13. Beyond
14. The Blackened Coffin
The dark road travelled by Faxed Head since the early 1990s was long thought to have dead-ended ages ago – but with the torn-from-the headlines appearance of the recent ‘Vaxxed Head’ 7? single, hopes are rising in the scattered and shattered Head heads around the world. Raise the roof a little higher: ‘Exhumed at Birth’, the long-lost 1997 debut album, is now seeing its first-ever vinyl release. And the remastered tracks sound incredible.
Faxed Head are a part of an almost-lost current of protest music from the underground of thirty years ago. They presented as a band with features entirely obscured from view by crudely made costumes showcasing their(allegedly disfigured) heads. Their post-hardcore music exploded into adjacent permutations of aggressive metallic rock and dime-store musique concrète. When they played live, the spectacle of it all was as intense as the music and their insane backstory – which inspired enclaves of enraptured freaks around the planet to declare them most supreme.
By the time ‘Exhumed at Birth’ was delivered, though, their story was almost over. Between 1992 and 1997, the band released five singles(many on Gregg Turkington’s Amarillo Records, home to Neil Hamburger and Secret Chiefs 3) and played around the Bay Area and Japan, introducing their decidedly outre approach to DIY metal. Their aliases – Neck Head, La Brea Tar Pits Head, McPatrick Head, Graph Head and Fifth Head – alongside track titles like ‘Pantera Lines’ and the road-rubber wordplay of the songs on the ‘Tire’ EP – indicated that something was rotten in Denmark. Of course it was! And lots of other places too. This is exactly what had willed Faxed Head into being. (The true identity of the ‘Exhumed at Birth’-era bandmembers, for those who insist on knowing: Trey Spruance, Gregg Turkington, Brandan Kearney, Phil Franklin and James Goode.)