I wrote a review for BSE when I got "Songs From The Manor" the Empty-Headed Heroes debut cd last year. Thought I would post it here while waiting for the long awaited second cd in hopes of urging the Heroes to hurry up already and get on with it. (Scroll down to read Paul's UPDATE on their progress!)
Latest word from Kev is :
"As far as gigs go, at the moment we are recording our second demo so we have no gigs until Tommyfest III on August Bank Holiday."
Did he say 'at the moment we are recording our second demo'!?! YaY.
Did he say 'no gigs until Tommyfest III on August Bank Holiday.' YaY for all you lucky folks who can see Empty-Headed Heroes at Tommyfest III.
Kevin Atherton – Vocals DavePayne - Guitar Paul Bamford - Harmonica
Cold Hearted Woman
Empty-Headed Heroes "Songs from the Manor"
Disclaimer : This is my review and I'll gush if I want to. That's right. I'm not a 'real' music critic, paid to plug or pan the 'new' thing. Nor am I a failed and frustrated and envious musician who writes reviews to get some perverse kick out of writing pretentious, boring reviews. Hell, I'm not even a site or zine owner trying to score free CDs on the promise of writing rave reviews of them. Actually, though I've written some gig reviews over the years for various zines, I've never ever attempted to write a music review. All I know about music is what I like and what I don't. And what I like, I feel passionate about which brings you and I dear reader to the fact that...
I freakin' LOVE the sound of Empty-Headed Heroes. From the moment I heard a few songs on the awesomely designed EHH website and EHH Myspace, it was complete head-over-heels love at first listen. These are great songs not just musically, but lyrically also. They shine. They sparkle. They shimmer. (Songwriting! Songwriting! Songwriting! EHH's got it down and most other bands… don't). But okay, you say… A few audio samples? A few songs? Well, I was hooked. I wanted more and lucky for me, my nephew (okay, okay, he's not really my nephew) Paul Bamford sent me info on "Songs from the Manor" a CD that looks like a mini vinyl "in sexy black." Hah, who could resist? Really, I hate to be shallow but on appearance alone, this CD is freakin' adorable, cute as a button and harkens back to me a time in my youth when buying 45 RPM single vinyls was not the cool option but the only option.
So Kevin, please, please ship internationally… Score!
Royal Mail delivery from across the pond and then via country roads to my little hillbilly, valley home, and I'm writing this right now listening to "Songs from the Manor" for the fourth consecutive time today. God Damn and Holy Shit. For the first three listens, I couldn't sit still long enough to type about it (what with musically-induced King Endorphin and Queen Adrenalin swirling through me). There is not a single "Song from the Manor" I've yet to skip over.
Why do I dig this music so much, you ask? I could say Kevin's voice (wow!) and Dave's guitar playing (wow!) have that easy-going, bluesy rock but fun feel that I love so much, and that Paul's harmonica playing is… is, well, nothing short of brilliant. Well okay, it's cool as shit anyway. So skillful are EHH, they make it all sound effortless and fun and that's the key for me. Even the back-up vocals, which normally, I'm not so fond of and find distracting, here blend well and add to the overall atmosphere. Speaking of which, I can so imagine EHH playing some packed but seedy, little smoky dive in New York City's Greenwich or East Village back in the sixties... Hah! The sixties, probably before any of the Heroes were born but still that is what comes to mind when I listen to their music.
Okay then, enough gushing for now, huh? Just buy this freakin' awesome CD, will ya? And listen to the "Songs from the Manor."
It feels good. Go on, do it.
"Songs From the Manor" Empty-Headed Heroes
01 Habit so Hard to Break
02 Never Gonna Happen
03 Eighth Deadly Sin
04 Waiting For Amy
05 Bitchwhipped
06 Empty Stash Blues
07 Tender Touch
08 Necessarily Nervous
09 On Your Own
10 Cold Hearted Woman
11 Suffocation
***Empty-Headed Heroes progress report***
It must be almost a year, now, since we started thinking about a follow-up to ’Songs from the Manor’ at Heroes HQ, and not a great deal less since we’ve been promising people that it’d be ready in no time at all. Best laid plans ’n’ all that, eh? The good news is that things have finally started to move again, and after an evening’s recording ’monica parts on Thursday, I thought I’d put a few words down about how its sounding so far.
A bit of background first: anyone who’s seen us in the last year (at least) will have heard plenty of the newies, already; ’Hey Darlin’’, ’Don’t F*** Up’ and ’Still Ain’t Gone’ have been played at almost every gig we’ve done in a while, with ’Broken Record’ and ’Your Heart is Made of Stone’ close behind. If memory serves, we started recording early last summer, and stalled soon after, then smashed headfirst into a brick wall late last year, after Dave’s career move (oink!) and my month in Ecuador. Since I got back in mid-December we’ve played a grand total of three gigs. No points for effort, then.
Anyway, the good news is that things have started to creak and groan back to life again. We’ve ditched everything we recorded last year and gone back to square one, with Dave re-recording all of the guitar parts he put down last year. I had my first listen to them on Thursday, and I’d say its been well worth the hiatus. Musically, its bang on - there are some very lovely noises on there - and the recordings sound amazing; Kev (doing all the knob-twiddling himself at home again) has managed to bring out a great big, pie-munchin’, hoochie-mama of a sound. Its crisp, clear, fatter than a hippo on the Atkins diet and dirty in all the right places.
Putting down the ’monica parts was great fun. The fact that I was completely under-rehearsed on a couple of tunes made it very instinctive and loose-feeling, especially on YHIMOS, which was pretty much improvised on the spot, bringing out some quite unexpected stuff in the process. We managed to get ’monica parts on five tracks down in less than two hours (one-take Bamford strikes again!), with just some minor tweaking to be done on one of them. Once the vocals are down on those five, that’s half the record done and ready to go.
As well as the tunes mentioned above, people with nothing better to do than listen to what we play at gigs may remember ’Sleepless’, a folky ballad that we played a few times last summer; its sounding sweet and mellow. Dirty Little Mouth is another one that had a few airings about a year ago, before getting shut away in a closet while we tried to figure out where to go with it. While my attention was elsewhere, Dave did just that and its now a beast of a tune, on which I’m pretty anxious to get my honk going as soon as I can - looking forward to gigging it, too.
There’s one other tune, who’s name escapes me right now: it started life as an instrumental jam that we opened the set with a couple of times, but it kinda fell on its arse. Dave’s re-jigged it a bit and turned it into another belting rock monster of a song, with an instrumental passage in the middle that jumps from one riff to the next in a fashion that would make the Wildhearts blush. Another one that I can’t wait to get my teeth into.
We’ve got one or two other little gems waiting for work to start on them, but it looks like we’re finally getting somewhere at last. Musically, this is a real step forward from SFTM: the songs are better, the grooves bigger, there are more shades of light and dark going on (’Manor’ was a little heavy on the heartache, after all). Kev’s recording skills have come along, too, so we’ve got a much clearer sound going on. Most importantly, though, Empty-Headed Heroes (AKA Two Baldies and a Pig) are getting better at doing what we do best - making acoustic music that’s louder, dirtier and more aggressive than anybody else thought was possible.
Toot toot!
Paul Bamford
April 5, 2008
Empty-Headed Heroes Web Site - http://www.emptyheadedheroes.co.uk/
Empty-Headed Heroes Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/emptyheadedheroes
