REVIEW: Headrillaz, Coldharbour Rocks (Gee Street)
- Krisjanis Gale
Not quite Chemical Brothers, not quite Omni Trio, not quite Autechre, not quite Crystal Method, not quite synth-funk, not quite drum and bass, not quite minimalist-industrial, not quite trip-hop acid squelch, Headrillaz can be found in some bizarre middle-ground the rein. Ears wide open, minds even wider, they've taken ideas from just about everything currently popular about electronica, ground it all up in samplers and synthesizers, and produced a brilliantly chaotic album entitled Coldharbour Rocks .
It is not entirely chaotic, however; every song seems to follow this basic recipe: start a beat, introduce the first melodic bit, let it fade, introduce another melodic bit, re-introduce the first, repeat N times, break it all down, build it back up again, let it roll to a climax, and finish abrubtly with a radically different end-sequence. This would seem to suggest Coldharbour as being a formula album. It is - but it matters not. Why? Think about how most jazz is composed. It follows the same basic recipe. What makes jazz interesting is a complex combination of rhythm and orchestration... the result is order from chaos. Headrillaz are employing the same theory. Although most of the songs seem quite repetitive, if you really listen you'll discover they aren't at all, and taken as a whole, Coldharbour Rocks sounds like a performance piece... a layering of insanely random otherworldly synthetic textures atop a stable ear-drilling beat, making it equally worthy of dancehall madness, or introspective, albeit disturbed, private listening.
The final word: Headrillaz are clever boys, restless about the current state of electronica, and brave enough to issue a wake-up call. In much the same way old-school rap beats once echoed through the streets, eminating from boom boxes resting on the shoulders of a generation almost two decades past, the sounds of Headrillaz, and their successors, will invade our aural environment of the future.
