Birdhead – Massive Aggressive: track-by-track

One half of Edinburgh duo Birdhead, Stephen Donkin talks us through their latest album Massive Aggressive track-by-track with an exclusive first listen

Feature by Stephen Donkin | 26 Sep 2018

Five years since their debut album Pleasure Centre, Edinburgh duo Birdhead are back with their follow-up Massive Aggressive. Ahead of its release on 28 September, The Skinny are delighted to be premiering the album in full, which you can listen to in the SoundCloud player at the foot of this page (click here if it's not displaying correctly), with a track-by-track explanation from singer and multi-instrumentalist Stephen Donkin.

Custom Muscle
"The big opener. The best records start with a statement of intent eh? Well this is ours – a dirty, nasty stompalong with synths and guitars flying all over the shop. When we were first writing this tune we were trying to make it more complicated than it needed to be, and when we settled on that big kick snare rhythm with the buzzing, pulsing bass underneath, we knew we had a topper. This one got the video treatment, we filmed ourselves having a trans-dimensional fistfight up in Skye."

Isolator
"A relentless, buzzy wee bastard of a tune. Once this gets going (which it does from 0.0001s) it never lets up. I particularly like in this one how the big, sharp, metallic synth slice chops up the airwaves in the track out of nowhere. It's a bit of a blade to the dish."

Tesseract
"This is probably the most full on guitar-heavy track on the record. It’s us letting ourselves off the leash and just smashing the guitars and drums into oblivion. Coming off the back of Isolator, together they are five minutes of aural destruction."

Incidentals
"Then things calm down a little bit. Everything needs balance, light and shade, and this is the calm to the previous two tracks’ storm. This instrumental number was the result of a protracted jam in the studio and has come out to be a really satisfying ambient, textural thing. I love it."

Science Eye
"Ramping back up into sonic assault territory, this is a bit of a two-hander. The first section is layers of guitars and bassy synths that all fuse together into a block of controlled chaos. An abrupt segue into the middle section and then we are out into a dreamy, jangly, more melodic back half that drifts around on a bouncing bassline. About as close to a guitar solo as I ever get."

Massive Aggressive
"The title track. People always look for the title tracks on albums I think, and this one comes right dead centre in the record. To me, this sort of sounds like a sci-fi TV theme tune, but nobody else has ever agreed with me. It has an icy sort of windswept vibe to it and is one of the more melodic tracks on the record."

Sunsleeper
"This is when things start to get really motorik. We generally use Sunsleeper to close our sets because the last couple of minutes are a real mind-expander. It’s so much fun to play and you can really get locked into it. Sometimes I can see people’s eyes change a bit when they watch us play it, like a part of their consciousness has been realigned and is now directly tethered to the celestial bodies we share the galaxy with. There is a chance they could just be smashed, but it helps me focus."

Autostrider
"The cosmic expanse of Sunsleeper goes straight into Autostrider, which locks the ears back down to terra firma. An endless tarmac propulsion is the mental image here and a neverending movement forwards, upwards, anywhere. I love the way this one is basically the same throughout but twists and turns and tricks the ear into picking up new little details. Marty, our producer, did a great job on this one."

Lotus Eater
"The words that come into my head whenever I listen to Lotus Eater are 'crinkle cut'. I don’t know why, there is something about the crunchy off-kilter rhythm that just screams a packet of Highlanders. We get in trouble with sound engineers for this one a lot because they assume our equipment has broken."

Tweak
"Lotus Eater and Tweak run into one another, like that guy who just wants to keep the night alive even though everyone else is kettled. Tweak allows a lull and then picks back up into an arpeggiated, resonant workout to close."

Beasts of England
"Just as any good record needs a strong open, it needs a big closer. I always think about the way The Doors used to close their albums with a big epic and I wanted to do something similar. So we gave ourselves room to breathe on this one and didn’t allow any thoughts about 'Will this work on Spotify?' or any nonsense like that. So it takes a while to get going but that initial investment pays off I think, and as the track builds and comes to a crescendo it brings together everything that came before it, both on this record and our first."


Massive Aggressive is released on 28 Sep via Good Gear Records; Birdhead play Brig Below, Edinburgh, 28 Sep

http://www.birdhead.co.uk/