Archive for Hair Police

Hair Police – Constantly Terrified (Troubleman) 2005

Posted in Hair Police, Music, noise with tags , , on August 19, 2010 by noisenoisenoise

Have you ever had one of those “Holy Fuck!!” moments when listening to noise. Like when a record totally scares you and makes your heart pound through your chest. This is one of those records. Hair Police are at the Wolf Eyes horror-metal-noise end of the whole noise spectrum. Half of the band spend their time as part of Burning Star Core and to hear them in this guise is confronting as hell. I am a massive fan of Hair Police. I own  most of their proper releases and they’ve made a previous appearance here. Constantly Terrified is excellent. It’s almost like Black Metal noise – the vocals are a cross between  Atilla from Sunn 0))) and that guy from Sword Heaven.

But back to that Holy Fuck moment. It happens in the first ten minutes. The  first track starts out as a rather pleasant (in a noise sense) combination of spazzy improv drumming and what sounds like the repetition of a single note on a piano   The repetition is quite meditative and extremely satisfying but at 7 minutes and 30 seconds a supernova explodes in your ears and you die.  The other tracks are pretty good too.

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Hair Police – Certainty of Swarms (No Fun Productions) 2008

Posted in Hair Police, Music, noise with tags , , , on December 20, 2008 by noisenoisenoise

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In my recent explorations of noise I seem to have swerved away from the visceral, horror-metal bands such as Wolf Eyes and Cherry Point. I’ve found that sub-genre of noise to be a bit stale and I’m got way more excited over artists like Daniel Menche and Burning Star Core. Now Menche has supposed to have dabbled in this blacker than thou stuff as well but I haven’t managed to delve that far back yet. Based on  everything I had read and everything I had heard (which granted was limited to youtube videos) about the band, I didn’t feel a huge urge to dabble. What broke the drought was one of the best pieces of music criticism I have read in some time. David Keenan in the Wire was given an entire page to wax lyrical on the death of rock and the importance of bands like Hair Police.

There have been a lot of bands out there who have danced on the line between noise and rock. Shit and Shine, Mouthus, Double Leopards etc. You can add Hair Police to the list but perhaps it’s fair to say they are  slanted towards black metal than  rock itself. For what it is worth I think  Keenan is dead right because sometimes we all need a record like Certainty of Swarms just to kick us put of a complacent musical rut. Hair Police have produced a truely nasty record. What sets them apart is that the music (a term I use loosely   as they produce is not as oppressively relentless as some of their fellow scenesters. All of the light has not been sucked out of the sound. The music is allowed to breath  and take shape. It is an extraordinarily good record an if you’ve dabbled in a bit of this sort of stuff it is a real treat. Definitely one for my best of list for 2008.

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