Severed Heads: CDSD

Come listen to Come Visit the Big Bigot with me

np: "Twenty Deadly Diseases"

i've been playing 'harold and cindy hospital' a lot lately - love the total switch-up from punishing slo-mo death-stomp to that really pretty synth melody

and its all kind of the same vibe

Sevs continue to be more active onstage since splitting up than for years before: US tour titled Better Dead Than Head

Sept 18 San Francisco at Elbo Room
Sept 19 Glendale, LA at Complex
Sept 20 Seattle at the Highline
Spet 23 Austin
Sept 24 NYC at Santos Party House
Sept 25 Tampa
Sept 26 Chicago at Cold Wave Fest

Last Thursday they debuted the first "new" Heads material since 2007, a 20-minute piece which was performed live as an entire radio session. Streamable here.

now downloadable

Link doesn't seem to work, could you try again?

it's an rss feed, will work in Firefox!

Eh, maybe he'll put it up on his Bandcamp.

http://fbiradio-storage.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/podcasts/144/audio/1465091810270.mp3

?

video snippets up now

(wave hi to me at 0:24)

Been coming back to Rhine a lot recently.

Just two cents from a loooong time Clifford. I wouldn't have guessed it, all those years ago. But it seems to me nowadays that the real genius in Severed Heads is/was not Tom Ellard (though he's def. the best songwriter). No, the man responsible for making those songs/trax so strange and memorable and so memorably strange is/was Garry Bradbury! His solo works (and w/ the duo SIZE) over the last several years are the answered prayers for Clifford's who thought the post-BigBigot era Heads was not exactly the avant cat's PJs, that they were previously. And that's with all the humour and weirdness in full flower. I really can't recommend them all enough.

Listening now to some Garry Bradbury on bandcamp, and it's great stuff! Vyrna is on the money.

vyrna knowl is also wading through a ventilator.

Yeah that Panspermia Plus compilation is 33 tracks long, available free if you want, and extremely good.

thanks for the recommendation, my first exposure to Bradbury didn't click, but this is pure candy

New Sevcom sampler, four tracks, good listen

https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/album/a-sevcom-sampler-2018

And Mr. Ellard has a new album out under his own name:

https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/album/publicist

released simultaneously with a new Severed Heads album-length-project, it might be worth noting:

https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/merch/aversion-2-lab-rat-box

(Aversion 2 is the sequel to an as-yet-unreleased album called Aversion, which is covers of classic rock songs; Aversion 2 is built on samples of classic rock songs.)

It sounds like rock but only a memory of it, or an approximation made by an algorithm. I like some rock music, and there’s no criticism implied, just some curious misrepresentation which allows me to practice some heavy psychedelic production.

Started a farewell* tour last night, eight more US dates before the band goes back in the box. Tom announced several songs as not having been played in America before, and a few haven't been played live at all before.

A tour-exclusive CD features studio recordings of the new arrangements of most of the setlist:

https://i.imgur.com/pEldaal.jpg

* yes, they stopped without fanfare once, and played a final show ever twice after that. but Tom's saying that forty years into the band (and ten years of playing boring old songs to boring old farts as a nostalgia reunion act) he's definitely had enough of lugging flight cases around, and he & Stewart have lives & jobs. any future Sevs performances would be one-offs in unusual circs, like the JSPAC show or Beautiful Arabic Surface live-to-air.

oooh I could go see 'em in Houston this weekend!

I'll be seeing them in New York, though not the show with Pop Will Eat Itself, who may not even make it as they're having visa issues, and even if they did make it and I was going to that show, which I'm not, I'd probably be better off as I'm not sure how I feel about a PWEI without Clint Mansell and I'm pretty sure they're music has not aged as well as Severed Heads, but the nostalgia is STRONG.

ha ha, the Houston show was meant to be a co-headline with Pop Will Eat Itself, but got price-reduced to just Sevs playing live at a goth/alt DJ night bcz only 26 tickets sold. you'll have room to dance!

(last night was also meant to have PWEI, but the US embassy did not process their visas)

go! the show is a lot of fun.

xpost

PWEI toured a This Is The Day... 30th anniversary show in the UK this year with four out of five classic-lineup members, but the US tour was/maybe is going to be more Graham's industrial metal nu-PWEI

hahaha, don't worry, I've spent plenty of evenings dancing at Numbers when it's 3/4ths empty

dammit why is the NYC show next week

This was fun in SF. Wish I'd known about the CD.

American tour CD now available on Bandcamp:

https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/album/living-museum

Oh a reissue of Clean with extra tracks, my twisted arm, etc.

https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/album/clean

Also Tom sez "If you have to have cancer, then the thyroid is a good place to have it, so I’m not worried, but I’m bloody cranky about it let me tell you."

interesting bits here http://tomellard.com/wp/2019/12/plans-for-2020/

Ellard's latest rebrand as an unsevered solo artist is up:

https://nilamox.bandcamp.com/

At launch there's a CoKlaComa best of, an unreleased 2002 CoKlaComa album, and a $2 mini-album of interpretations of Pachelbel's Canon, under a new alias. He's said that Nilamox is intended to become the home for his future activities.

A new C21st best-of-rarities mix streamable now, conceived for vinyl and out on December 8th in that format.

(Commissioned by Medical Records,) Heads mastermind Tom Ellard compiled this collection of work from the ‘00s from a variety of sources, from limited, hand-cut discs to video game soundtracks, and then wove snippets from those pieces into a stream of electronic consciousness. Four sides, four songs, all Severed Heads.

ooh

!!!!

Ellard has remixed the first four Music Server albums into binaural sound

and 5 and 6 are on Bandcamp apparently in a format that works in 5.1 surround if you have that, or 360º if you have the latest unwired Apple Airpods, and they don't fall out of your ears when you move your head to follow the sound

Here's an hour of radio from a few days after Robert Racic died, playing tracks he edited or produced and talking to collaborators about his work. Pause-buttoned in 1996, and uploaded in 2021, by a guy who was in Sevs in between those dates.

(mp3 on dropbox)

We're making a spreadsheet of every Severed Heads live show. 250+ shows - but with gaps & errors. e.g. Brighton 1985 where? Melbourne Music Expo in 1987? Wollongong in 2007?
If you have any documentation all replies welcome. https://t.co/ugFXBGaXi0

— Tom Ellard (@t0m3llArd) April 30, 2021

There's a vinyl reissue of Rotund for Success coming out this year on Medical Records, fwiw

it might be an acquired taste but the ButchCrutch releases on nilamox* where ellard is just doing the vocals are pretty good

Tom:

After ~30 years in service, some SH albums on Bandcamp have minimal audience. I'm planning a compilation that will condense these 'zombie titles': Cuisine, Gigapus, Haul Ass, Under Gail Succubus.
If you own any of these please download your files SOON.

Cuisine With Piscatorial was the last Sev Heads album I bought during the height of my fandom and I still love it, I'd say nearly as good as Rotund for Success.

The compilation above now exists, and people who already owned Gigapus on Bandcamp now own "Focus (A mid-life crisis compilation)" instead. (Otherwise it's five bucks, and includes a 45-page pdf - healthy notes from Tom on the purchase page too.)

this means that Gigapus has existed as:
a 14-track CD plus Metapus CD-Rom
a European CD with thirteen of the fourteen tracks mastered by the co-founder of Yello instead of Ellard
a 2xCD with the Dead Eyes Opened Remix 1994 EP included
an American single CD with no bonuses or differences
a CD plus Vidipus VHS
a 17-track Gigaplus CD-R reissue with one track swapped out for a remix, plus three bonus tracks / mixes
a 2xCD-R issue with the 14-track/one-track-swapped album remastered, and a bonus disc of demos, mixes and versions (also the Bandcamp version)
and a U2/iphone style 'surprise, you have a different record now'

In more rationalising, all the tracks from the Twister / Retread club mix compilation are now bonus tracks on "Dead Eyes Opened 94 ++", which is 100 minutes long and free for a limited time.

The 2019 live-versions-at-home farewell CD is set to be reissued, and will come off bandcamp once it's a physical item again. And the 1982 Blubberknife live-plus-8-tracks album is back up in its 2002 expanded form, for $5.

Why is this guy always tinkering.

a GB RIP thread from TE:

1960 - 2022

— Tom Ellard (@t0m3llArd) January 8, 2022

oh no!

Always kicking myself for missing the show in Baltimore in Feb 2020, but I think he was not in the lineup? Came to this group too late love Petrol so much.