The dark road travelled by Faxed Head since the early 1990s was long thought to have dead-ended ages ago – but with the torn-from-the- headlines appearance of the recent ‘Vaxxed Head’ 7″ single, hopes are rising in the scattered and shattered Headheads around the world. Raise the roof a little higher: ‘Exhumed at Birth’, the long-lost 1997 debut album, is now seeing its first-ever vinyl release. And the remastered tracks sound incredible.

Faxed Head are a part of an almost-lost current of protest music from the underground of thirty years ago. They presented as a band with features entirely obscured from view by crudely made costumes showcasing their (allegedly disfigured) heads. Their post-hardcore music exploded into adjacent permutations of aggressive metallic rock and dime-store musique concrète. When they played live, the spectacle of it all was as intense as the music and their insane backstory – which inspired enclaves of enraptured freaks around the planet to declare them most supreme.

By the time ‘Exhumed at Birth’ was delivered, though, their story was almost over. Between 1992 and 1997, the band released five singles (many on Gregg Turkington’s Amarillo Records, home to Neil Hamburger and Secret Chiefs 3) and played around the Bay Area and Japan, introducing their decidedly outre approach to DIY metal. Their aliases – Neck Head, LaBrea Tar Pits Head, McPatrick Head, Graph Head and Fifth Head – alongside track titles like ‘Pantera Lines’ and the road-rubber wordplay of the songs on the ‘Tire’ EP – indicated that something was rotten in Denmark. Of course it was! And lots of other places too. This is exactly what had willed Faxed Head into being. (The true identity of the ‘Exhumed at Birth’-era bandmembers, for those who insist on knowing: Trey Spruance, Gregg Turkington, Brandan Kearney, Phil Franklin and James Goode.)

A fascination with the then-seemingly outdated analogue technology became a fetishization of analogue decay in the production of the music, as they used misaligned heads on the tape deck and dubs from other failing machines to achieve additional random violence in the songs. This proved very appealing to noise players who wanted to know what they were hearing – including Merzbow and the Boredoms, who no doubt appreciated the dark gravity of the satire as well.

Further extending the thought-field of Faxed Head’s feral ravings were lyrics from artists no self-respecting exurban hard-rocker would know – Leonard Cohen and Richard Harris – and found poetry culled from scammer compilations of poetry solicicited in the advertising sections of the National Enquirer.