Mahogany Drift come out of San Antonio with a bio full of atmospheric guitars and “haunted Americana,” which makes it funny that their debut single, Headspace, sounds like the band kicking over a table. It’s the first taste of a forthcoming EP, and it’s dirty, sloppy and a bit punk in the way that makes you suspect it got recorded before anyone could talk them out of it.
Lyle Hodge‘s voice comes through like it’s being shoved down a phone line, squashed and tinny, and I kept waiting for the trick to get old. It never quite does, mostly because the band behind him is loud enough that the effect plays as a fight and not a filter. Plenty of groups slap a lo-fi vocal on a song to look cool. Here it sounds like he’s yelling over everything and only barely winning, which is a much better look.
It’s a five-piece, with Matt Kramer and Ryan Hoff both covering guitar and keys, Benjamin Lee Medeiros Jr. on bass and Jeff Torres on drums, and for a track this ragged that’s a lot of people in one room, none of them worried about tidying up. Nobody here is waiting politely for their turn. You can feel five people shoving for space, and that crowding is where most of the energy comes from, rather than from any one riff or fill.
The dreamy, spacious half of what the band says it does doesn’t show up here, and I didn’t miss it.
Mostly this is a song for jumping around somewhere too small, spilling a drink and not apologising. Put it on when you need to get rid of a bad day, or when the playlist has been all soft focus for too long and somebody needs to slap it awake. The grit takes over from the first listen, and it’s the kind of messy that still sticks in your head afterwards, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. I can’t tell you from one single whether the EP keeps this energy up, and that phone-line vocal could get tiresome stretched across a whole record. As an opening shot, though, and as a hit of adrenaline for anyone missing guitar music with some dirt on it, Headspace gets the job done. Turn it up and annoy a neighbour.
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