Open Head
What Is Success
WHARF CAT
Don’t get confused: Open Head’s new album What Is Success doesn’t seek an answer to its title’s anodyne question—ergo the missing question mark. Implicitly, by using that phrase as their album title and presenting it the way they do, the experimental quartet from Kingston, New York is undercutting the very notion that it’s socially common for such a ridiculous concept as “success” to be considered at a time when everything’s broken and the term has essentially lost all meaning. The regularly rambunctious but rarely refractory Open Head is an ideal candidate to musically examine this thematic ball of wax from all angles. Is a song deemed a success if it passes melodic muster, like the mid-album cut “N.Y. Frills”? What if it’s an obtuse but honestly delivered tune like “Fiends Don’t Lose”? An unrestrained cacophony such as “Take It From Me”? A math-rock melee, as demonstrated by “Bullseye”? Raucous rock à la “Julo”? Or how about the dullish “Monotones”?
The answer is simple, of course: all songs are a success—except when they aren’t. Same goes for everything in life. But the reason What a Success stands out is that the excavators are trying to forge sonorous music against all odds (as explained in the above paragraph), and they’re exactly the right configuration to be teaming together to do so. Vocalist/guitarists Jared Ashdown and Brandon Minervini, bassist Jon McCarthy, and drummer Dan Schwartz seem to have melded their brains before embarking on this ambitious mission—which, in all fairness, could’ve just as easily been called “What Is Music.” Sure, they have the aforementioned instruments at their disposal, but the building blocks the quartet is working with effectively amount to a shit-show of discordant, angular, and off-tune notes. Like puzzle masters, they piece together the bits and, one by one, slide the completed slabs into a kiln to be produced, mastered, and all that.
By spelunking NYC’s music history and linking up sounds from the city’s litany of critical yet critically unfamiliar underground fabrics—hip-hop, no wave, electronic music, noise-rock—Open Head effectively weave a tapestry that serves as much as a historical document and a tribute to the city as it does an intriguingly fresh listen. File this one under “experimental field recordings with an embedded sociological and cultural message.”
