Moonhead [LP]

Thin White Rope's second album, Moonhead, is an edge-of-chaos masterpiece, an album that sounds like NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE tackling JOY DIVISION's Unknown Pleasures. All of the 14 songs, even a pounding redo of JIMMY REED's blues classic "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby," are so wound up and tense that the band sounds like it could explode at any point; the fact that it doesn't, not even on extended guitar workouts like "Crawl Piss Freeze" and the epic closer "Take It Home," gives the album an almost unbearable tension and sense of foreboding. The songs all basically start at the same point - dual-guitar leads over Jozef Becker's Krautrock-like steady pulses and Stephen Tesluk's throbbing, minimal basslines - but Guy Kyser's lyrics and tortured wails to give rise to deadpan humor, providing the album with so much variation that it never becomes deadening. An intense, satisfying LP, Moonhead is Thin White Rope's most substantial and powerful effort. Frontier Records is digitally remastering Thin White Rope's first five records and reissuing them on vinyl for the first time in decades.