Lungfish - Necklace Of Heads LP

More LP Sunday. The band that ruined my left ear at the Hampshire College Red Barn as part of that triple-bill. There's no stage at the Red Barn, and I was maybe 30-40' from the guitarist. He turned to change a setting on his amp in between songs, and this blast of feedback punched me right in the left ear. There was a rumbling noise, and then nothing. I lost all hearing in that ear for days. I couldn't drive with the window open as the sound of rushing air hurt like hell. Funny thing, no one else reacted to the feedback at all. I think I just happened to have one ear in the exact spot where all of these stray sound waves just converged.

As for the show, these guys were great. Daniel Higgs is all sweaty manic intensity behind a massive beard.  The band behind him was rock-solid and played with a lot of energy despite standing completely still for the whole show. I grabbed this right afterward, hearing loss be damned. Stylistically, they're hard to categorize. Sure, they're a DC area post-hardcore act, but they're not like the rest of them. They're definitely more inventive than the rest, and you can tell they're still experimenting with their sound quite a bit on this little 8 song LP. They bounce back and forth between clean sounding guitar and distortion, throw in an anthemy sort of song in "Nothing Is Easy". There's even a little reggae inspired break in the song Fambly. They eventually settled on this repetitive rhythmic hypnotic sound with their later stuff, and you can hear the beginnings of that in "Not Only Long..." and the beginning of "Fambly".

Yet another band I lost track of, and I'm pretty sure I missed out. They've released nine more albums over the last 20 years. I've just started to pick through this huge back catalog of their work while ripping this.These songs were lumped in with their second album's CD as bonus tracks. As a standalone album, it was only released on vinyl, and it's long out of print. The Simple Machines label seems to have died some time ago.

1. Come Clean
2. Put Your Halo On
3. Ain't No Colr
4. Not Only Long Ride Too High
5. Parthenogenesis
6. Devilhead
7. Nothing Is Easy
8. Fambly

Enjoy!