“The Eyeball Dance” is an atmospheric, ghostly opener to an adventurous new album Dances/Curses, HEY COLOSSUS‘ lucky thirteenth record, the work of six noise rock, psychedelic and alt rock inspired musicians at the peak of their considerable powers of intuition and inspiration. Today, we’re pleased to give you their new lyric video, coming fresh off the November 6th releasee of ‘Dances/Curses’, available on 2LP/2CD/DL through Wrong Speed Records (Euro) & Learning Curve Records (US).
Comments the band: “The bass only plays one note, it’s in 7/8 time. The guitars, drums and vocals do all the work. Some people have said it sounds like No Means No. Others say it sounds like King Crimson. We reckon it sounds like the opening song from our 13th album.”
Constant motion is something Hey Colossus know a little about, now into their eighteenth year as a band in a never-ending search for new trouble and new epiphanies. When this iteration of the band – which came together around the making of their last release, 2019’s ‘Four Bibles’, geographically spread between Somerset, Watford, London, Nottingham and Sheffield – first began work the chemistry apparently took care of itself, with their meetings at weekend rehearsals seeing them undergo a process less like jamming and more like a particularly intensive form of instant composition.
Whatever sparks were spontaneously flying in these initial sessions, they gave rise to enough material to make Dances/Curses a double record, running the gamut from the rhythmically-driven, infectiously melodic songcraft of ‘Donkey Jaw’ and ‘Medal’ via the slow-burning atmospherics of ‘U Cowboy’ to the mightily motorik-driven 15 minute travelogue that is ‘A Trembling Rose’, which takes in a plethora of unified headspaces in richly cinematic style. Longterm Hey Colossus fan Mark Lanegan makes an appearance amidst the languid and sun-soaked denouement of ‘The Mirror’, the existential gravitas of his tones entirely at home in these revelatory surroundings.
Fittingly for a band who operate entirely by their own co-ordinates, Dances/Curses is released on bassist Joe Thompson’s own Wrong Speed Records, his latest such venture in a lifetime of steadfast belief in the DIY maxim, “It’s 100% time for all bands to take control of their shit” he notes. “All the tools are there to do it yourself. Back your own horse. It’s practical. It’s positive. There’s a chance things will never be the same, if change doesn’t happen now it never will.”
True to form for a band in full control, Dances/Curses is far from the kind of sprawling psych opus that exists purely due to the band being too baked, biased or blasé to edit it down. Indeed, this serendipitous record marks something even these six musicians never necessarily intended – a work in the tradition of the double album with an element of mystery, a record that somehow changes itself every time it returns to the shelf.
Somewhere on the great continuum between Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You and Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life Of Plants”, somewhere between the dances of aspiration and the curses of reality, Hey Colossus have created their finest alchemical achievement to date.
