Raging Head is the musical equivalent of an extreme skiing movie shown in a RSL or town hall by a sun fucked guy named Warren or Albie.
Tom Lyngcoln is a Tasmanian musician living in Melbourne since the year 2000, and has released 20 records in that time with various bands including Harmony, The Nation Blue, Lee Memorial, Magic Dirt, Pale Heads, and of course his compelling solo material. Raging Head follows debt solo album Doming Home.
Lyngcoln has a self proclaimed face like a steamed dim sim that has been self harmed so relentlessly that when it came time to replicate his notorious on-stage blood letting, armed with a pair of scissors on a Sunday afternoon in lock down, nothing came out. A raging head devoid of blood. A head so dry it never cracks a smile. A big white, male, middle class head trying to bleed a little and find some oppressive force to ruminate on. Oh the woe.
After 40 years the head still rages. It cuts hazier corners and the jowls swing at high velocity. The surgeries ring the nerve endings trying to hit the high notes. The chances of losing control, screaming through another lunch break, could end in not enough air to the brain or mass evacuation.
Aren’t you meant to mellow with age? Let’s overcompensate for years of balladry with Harmony through a deep fried punk record more fringe than The Nation Blue, kinetically charged by the drumming of Jay Allen, who has played in One Inch Punch, Mid Youth Crisis, The Kill and the empirically named Fuck...I’m Dead.
The Raging Head project started when Lyngcoln invited Allen to play drums for half an hour. Lyngcoln then took those shards and cooked them into 11 two minute ragers by cut and pasting the fragments into a fabricated pastiche. Then came all the guitars. Squiggly and ridiculous, fast beyond able.
The project was then handed over to Cal Foley to drop some bass into. After Lyngcoln watched Foley play along to the majority of Houdini by the Melvins during a soundcheck for his then band The Stevens, he ear-marked Cal as a future Number One Draft Pick.
And now with all instrumentation complete the inevitable task of writing the wretched words could no longer be avoided. So he stands in a shed before a radial arm saw and listens to each song on repeat until, concussed by the repetition, a sliver of a thought leaks out from his battered dome.
Staring into the spinning blade a line slowly forms and then another, until there’s eleven chapters of big words. And then you sing until it hurts and play it to someone. They look at you and who is this for? Just me I guess.
Release: 14 August, 2020, Solar/Sonar
Words: Solar/Sonar + Brain Drain PR