Obscure (but should not have been) album of the week...

BEDHEAD - WhatFunLifeWas [1994]

If there ever was a competition for the most low-key band in the cosmos, the awesomely understated (and now defunct) Texan four-piece Bedhead would claim the trophy. What Is Life (the first from a very fine trilogy of albums) moves at a deceptively languid pace. The soft, drowsy vocals from brothers Matty and Bubba Kane are buried low in the mix. The drummer is so restrained he might as well be shackled to his drum stool. Were it not for the fact that these songs have a tendency to suddenly detonate with guitar squalls and ocean-size cymbal washes, Bedhead would be positively horizontal.

Alas, Bedhead often get tagged to that lazy term applied to any “tempo-challenged” band in the 90s – slowcore. However, there are many elements to Bedhead that set them apart from their peers from this period. While the words are hard to decipher on almost every Bedhead track, they reveal a quirky, dark humour with repeated plays. Nowhere is this more evident than on ‘Bedside Table’, their first single they released after being signed to Butthole Surfers member King Coffey’s Trance Syndicate label in 1992:

you cut your head on the bedside table.
your temple bled as you were unable to remember
the lines of what you were reading
about someone deciding to quit speaking

‘Bedside Table’ is one of the great lost indie singles of the 1990s, a haunting slow-burner that lingers long with the listener after the climactic outro. Elsewhere, the epic, droning ‘Powder’ (clocking in at over seven minutes), is nectar for the ears, while the unexpectedly upbeat ‘To the Ground’ sounds like the Velvet Underground if they had spent more time chewing tobacco and playing in barns.

While later Bedhead releases would benefit from reigned-in production values (their final album, Transaction De Novo, was produced by Steve Albini – a great partnership), ‘WhatFunLifeWas’ is the best place to start for my money. There are also a handful of deleted EPs and singles worth tracking down on the online market, including the very literally-titled CDEP19:10, which contains a very worthy cover of Disorder by Joy Division.

-AMCS