A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Burn All The Ships LP by Headstones. Since returning in 2013 with Love + Fury, the Headstones have illustrated that they can orchestrate a comeback with greater competence than most other bands. Over the last twelve years, the band has come back in a manner similar to how Hard Core Logo did in Bruce MacDonald’s mock/rockumentary before stripping their sound to bare bones, picking up acoustic instruments and revisiting their early songbook in much the same way Michael Turner did in the original Hard Core Logo novel for their album One In The Chamber Music. After having completed all that, the band has ploughed forward and released three more albums – but their fourth since 2017, Burn All The Ships, represents a significant change in the group’s character. Now, there’s no exclamation of, “Oh we’re back,” and trying to claim a kind of novelty would be laughable; Headstones are back and they’re playing for keeps and no bullshit on Burn All The Ships.
Rather than blowing the doors open and burning synapses with something incendiary as Headstones have illustrated they can do time and again, when the needle sinks in and catches the groove of “Put That Car In Drive,” and almost solemn and reserved sound will make longtime fans look twice and listen harder. Right off, they’ll recognize that, no, this isn’t “It’s All Over,” and is certainly not “Reno” or “Downtown.” Here, the band is making their listeners wait – and so they’ll lean in to catch every word, and completely absorb lines like, “I was westward leaning/ And I got my reasons/ Never followed the North Star’s light/ And I’ve learned my lessons/ I got no more questions/ I just put that car in drive.” Every second and every damned microtone gets held carefully just out of listeners’ reach, sardonically – there is no easy ambrosia to be stolen but, as the song moves along its’ three-minute, fifty-two-second running, the band will have gently driven hooks into listeners and they’ll be aching for some relief by the end – it’s sardonically beautiful.
After the acerbic opening expressed by “Put That Car In Drive,” Headstones immediately shift gears into overdrive for “Decades.” There, very literally from the first strike of a (very tight and compressed-sounding) drum, listeners will be able to feel the little hairs on their necks begin to rise. Hugh Dillon seems to be sharing the sensation there too as he pushes his vocal hard through his larynx and thereby making it feel a little clipped or throttled as he chokes out, “Just landed on my feet in the middle of the street/ Like a rocket coming out of the door/ Seething underneath, and the heartbeat is obscene/ Affecting everything right down to the core,” knowing he has fans in the palm of his hand right away as he does it. Even on repeated listens, the energy does not fade from the opening measures of “Decades,” but the shock that listeners will feel as the song’s tempo quickly changes for the chorus doesn’t fade either; all of a sudden Jesse Labovitz’s drums shift so hard they almost evaporate and Dillon’s vocal tone deepens with the words, “Days bleed to decades/ Whole worlds fade away/ Days bleed to decades/ And I just can’t wake up that way” in a way which makes not just the song slow down, but the whole world seems to slow with it as well – for a moment. For those who are already in deep with the song, the effect is absolutely jarring; each amounts to nearly complete stops and starts before resetting for the next movement, and that process continues for the remainder of the cut’s two minute and forty-seven second running (it feels longer than it actually plays).
As the A-side progresses, it does find a consistent rhythm as it unfolds. While “Daylight Lightning” never stops sounding like some kind of fever dream (Hugh Dillon sounds drowsy throughout and Trent Carr’s guitars ape the same kinds of dreamy poses that The Tragically Hip did, toward the end of their career), “An Effort To Forget” gets stronger legs under it and moves very, very well. The song leaves a truly memorable impression with a bit of help from Metric’s Emily Haines; there, while Dillon plays the role of rough and tumble rule breaker that he’s played for the duration of his carer to date, Haines goes out of her way to strike a counterbalance for him as the sweeter part of a vocal couple in much the same way that Leah Fay Goldstein did for Peter Dreimanis when that pair were setting Toronto on fire with July Talk in the twenty-tens. The results are strong enough – particularly when Haines’ voice melds with a pedal steel guitar to produce a sound that is truly haunting – but when the cut begins to dissolve in its’ late playing, it does so too quickly and easily; it doesn’t leave an aftertaste in its wake, it just goes and leaves “City Of Ghosts” (the longest cut on the album) to figure out how to close the side with just the right amount of volume and power to feel like the right kind of bang (and it actually does that twice – thereby leaving a bit of uncertainty in its wake).
As soon as needle catches groove on the B-side of Burn All The Ships, “Details” immediately calls to mind some of the greatest opening moments in Headstones’ career. There, the sounds of “It’s All Over,” “Hindsight,” “Reno” and “Downtown” all converge and explode to remind fans that Headstones really do remember how to make fans cheer for their lives. There, all the elements just converge perfectly; right off, Carr’s guitar begins interweaving with White’s bass while Dillon’s lyrics begin to spiral out of control (check out lines like “Out in the cold rain, you’re out in the cold/ You’re out in the cold rain, you’re out on your own/ Drop into something, d-d-digging a hole/ You’re out in the cold rain and nobody’s home”), and Labovitz enters the mix last to kick the whole thing into gear. It’s the kind of moment that every Headstones fan hopes for – and that it happens at the beginning of the B-side energizes an album which wasn’t lacking in power even further. Those energy levels don’t wane after “Details” crashes to a close and, while “Navigate” feels unmistakably like a Headstones/Dallas Green co-write (there are elements of the song which would fit easily into a City and Colour or Alexisonfire composition, but fit with a Headstones song like a rainbow of gasoline on top of a deep puddle of water), it does not slow or distract from the momentum that Headstones has built through the album thus far.
As one listens, there’s no question that “Navigate” might mark a greater point of entry that Headstones could investigate further on future releases – but “Unnatural Causes” feels like a return to ground that Headstones opened about twenty-five years ago but are only now re-investigating. Fans who remember Headstones’ dalliances into reggae in the title track from Nickels for Your Nightmares will discover that the spirit hasn’t left the band quite yet as they revive the dub which powered them previously, but free of the narcotics which plagued Nickels…. Here, Dillon tones his bark down and lets producer Chris Osti turn both the reverb and dub reggae histrionics up to really saturate the song in vibes which honestly would probably work better in the late playing of a live performance than it does in the late playing of a studio album [a fact that was also true on Nickels… –ed] but, again, doesn’t detract mythically from the album because the bright spots continue to outshine the dimmer ones.
…And, when “Damned” breaks in with an acoustic guitar and a startlingly deep piano, fans know what’s coming and where the running’s all headed at album’s close. Unlike the band’s previous albums though, Headstones show a different kind of growth than they’ve ever shown before; while the band used to be content to let everything burn as any given record ended and let listeners love or hate what they’d done at their leisure, lines like, “Damned! If I haven’t seen the bottom/ Damned! If you think you’ve seen the depth/ Fooled! By the things that I’ve forgotten to remember/ In the seconds that I had left to connect” as well as later admissions of burning bridges, losing games and the prices associated with shortsightedness all illustrate that Headstones’ lyrics have deepened, and they’ve become aware that with time and lessons learned there is more at stake than they ever imagined before. Granted, one might have assumed that the lessons implied by “Damned” might have been the sort they would have learned years ago but, as the Headstones finally make these conceits with the tone they use, even the most heartless critic with decide that the epiphanies that Headstones find at the end of Burn All The Ships are better won late than never and, with those lessons learned, they’ll find themselves hoping that the band has more albums in them yet. [Bill Adams]
Further Reading:
Complete Headstones Discography Review
Artist:
https://headstonesband.com/landing-page/
https://www.facebook.com/HeadstonesBand/
https://www.instagram.com/headstonesofficial/?hl=en
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3yfNNHn865Z5J05WhWLa00
Album:
Burn All The Ships is out now. Buy it here, at the band’s official store.
