Hammerhead

At first, Hammerhead were scary. Not in the Alice Cooper b horror movie way with kooky make-up and judicious employment of midgets but in the are-these-the-thoughts-and-actions-of-a-blood-thirsy-psychopath way. At first i thought that this could be the soundtrack to "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." After a while it began to dawn on me that this is Henry's fucking band. It turns out it was just 3 guys from Fargo and none of them were Joseph Edward Duncan III.

When I saw them for the first time in Holloween in 1992. I was kind of left dumbfounded. It was loud, though not terrible fast, and introvertedly violent in a way that transfixed me. Paul Sanders beat and strangled the guitar as if he were trying to silence it, perplexed that all of his clumsy grappling seemed to make it scream and squeal louder and more vociferously. Paul Ericson's bass had so much drive and sound splitting distortion and volume that all the hair on my body fell out and my organs collapsed and then, as the corner of my mouth curled up into what looked like a smile, I soiled myself. After the show, I limped up to the band, all shiny and bald in strange places with trousers that needed to be changed and I thanked them.


"Into The Vortex" traded the etherial killer imagery for this sort of retro futuristic intergalactic murder rock. With graphics, as usual for Amrep bands. courtesy of Tom Hazelmyer. The songs still handle like like an old El Camino: heavy, lumbering and difficult to stop, with hair and some blood wedged in the grill and something unimaginable in the trunk.

Into The Vortex

This song is from a different record but I was at this show.