Head Wound City

Welcome to Head Wound City! Now die alone in the street, skull crushed flat by the bumper of that yellow cab you didn’t see coming—the one with wheels made of cyanide-laced donuts, and GG Allin’s grinning ghost grinding the gears. Head Wound City are a hardcore supergroup consisting of Jordan Blilie and Cody Votolato of Blood Brothers, Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Justin Pearson and Gabe Serbian, both from The Locust and Holy Molar. Jordan does the singing. Gabe plays drums. Cody does guitar stuff. So does Nick. JP plays bass. Most everybody sings along. They’ve been in some of the bands that have burned out the backs of your eyeballs, Yeah Yeah Yeahing you into a jitter sex frenzy, Locusting your flesh down to bare white bones, and spurting Blood Brothers all over your clean white sheets. It was always fun, though, wasn’t it? We always came back for more, did we not? The band began, as all good things, with a drunk dial: “The idea started in London after Blood Brothers played with Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” says Zinner. “Jordan and I were talking about Violent Ramp, the skate thrash band that some dudes from Wolf Eyes do, and we thought it would be really fun to do one ourselves. We drunk dialed JP and said he and Gabe were in our band.” The result was a self-titled EP released in 2005 on Three One G. It was written and recorded in a week, probably that same week you stayed inside mostly, jacking off to Suicide Girls and IMing your idiot friends. It opens with a death squall of feedback, 48 seconds of pure white noise bleed, before Jordan busts in the front door, running past you, chased by a barrage of blast beat missiles, screaming surrealist madtalk about holding hands in a head wound city. It’s seven songs in nine minutes, 41 seconds. Gruesome brutality laid against twitchy speed metal licks and classic punk austerity, a huge combo clusterfuck. Sayeth Jordan, “It's kind of like if Alien and Predator started a band instead of fighting each other.” Nothing much has happened with the band since the release of the EP, with the members each focusing on their main projects, but with no words to the contrary, we can only hope for more hyperactive brutality at some point in the future.