BIG BLACK — Headache / Heartbeat (review)

BIG BLACK — Headache / Heartbeat album cover EP · 1987 · Metal Related Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Warthur
Proudly proclaiming itself to be "not as good as Atomizer", you can't accuse the Headache EP of having an inflated sense of its own importance. Indeed, it was often bundled with the Heartbeat single, the band perhaps realising it needed a little more meat on the bone.

The fact is that Headache is a bit of a straggler - an EP emerging between their two major LP releases, Atomizer and Songs About Fucking, was always going to be overshadowed by those two classic slices of post-hardcore, and whilst the group had done interesting stuff in the EP format, the heyday of that approach had come and gone, with Lungs, Bulldozer, and Racer-X offering fascinating snapshots of how their sound came together. They sound is already together by this point - and with full-length albums now their main concern, they're not going to put the choicest cuts on something like this.

Still, B-grade Big Black is still a compellingly enjoyable prospect, and Grinder in particular is an exercise in seething tension the way only they do it.
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