I was a little pissed yesterday I couldn't get my hands on the "Bowing Heads" tape from NWN fest in Berlin (which I had been all psyched up on trying to go to since the summer, it's been like 10 years since I last went to Europe and it's on the top of my to-do list, but a little cirrhosis and hepatitis stopped me from doing pretty much anything less than sitting around watching old Saved By The Bell episodes at 5 in the morning, half passed-out on oxycodone and xanax), so I decided to write up a little something about this one instead. If anyone stocked up on copies of "Bowing Heads" don't be a dick and hoard them until it costs me $75 to buy it, because I don't have that kind of scratch, I need it to spend on warhammer paints and internet porn site subscriptions. Anyway, if you know anything about this tape, it's just the 5 Bone Awl segments of their split with The Rita, and it has no vocals. The highlight of the tape, the last song, is more mid-tempo and crushing, doomier (especially with no vocals), presenting a slightly heavier side of the band than normal. Kind of refreshing, the 'boop-bop-boop-bop' drums so typically used to drive the Bone Awl freight train are tossed out here. You gotta wait for it though, the tape opens in standard Bone Awl drums fare, two riffs alternating, and the second song does the exact same, and the third, and fourth, and the fifth, but you were expecting that. Well that's what you get when you want Bone Awl: same sameness ad infinitum, so I'm not complaining, but you have to be able to separate the aesthetic and artistic concept from the music itself at one point or another and ask yourself is this making my ears and brains happy? For one thing, just give me the damn vocals, stop squeezing every penny out of every song by re-releasing it in lesser forms. It's like how many times am I gonna hear those same two Furdidurke songs on different albums? In that case I don't mind because the songs are fucking brilliant and deserve to be heard. On that topic, if you're new to Bone Awl and want to pick something up that is actually priced reasonably, I'd get the Bone Awl/Furdidurke split 7". On the Bone Awl side, it's a much more thought out song and actually has some fucking drum fills and rhythmic dynamics, which is something you'd think you DON'T want from Bone Awl, but I think it gives just enough juice to keep the band in a listen-to-able place while still retaining the repetition and artistic conceptualization that makes the band what it is. Also the artwork is so much better. The art on "Sunless Xyggos" fucking sucks, especially coming from a band with a history of amazing minimalist scratched-off artwork, and compared to what's been done in their past, the whole "city-scape-made-liquid-static" is just too overdone within a noise perspective, which is partially the perspective this tape is coming from, both by means of the fact that it's the songs from the split with a HN guy and Bone Awl's status in the noise community on top of that. For a band so dependent on "the whole package" to survive, they dropped the ball on this one. I can't really tell you to buy this tape, or, if you do, fast forward to the last song for some doomed-out shit, which is the only song I think is worth reinvesting in an altered version for, primarily because the no vocals makes it fit better into a doom slot, whether or not that is a good thing I don't know, or else you're just hearing stripped down versions of songs from the split with The Rita, but without the context of The Rita's oversmushing it just sounds watered-down, which is exactly what it is.
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