Earlier this month I finally witnesssed a person walking across the heads of fellow human beings, so now I can say with authority that it's an excruciating thing to watch. Imagine someone's heel pressed so firmly against your forehead it begins piercing into your skin, and the uncomfortable sensation of losing yourself beneath it. This makes it even more apt that the Copenhagen punk band Lower have taken the title Walk on Heads for their debut EP, which merges the noise and clangor of 1970s post-punk and no wave with an aggression akin to 1980s hardcore, stretching those downer feelings across eight-and-a-half all-too-short minutes. As my eyes glued themselves to that headwalker, I could hear Lower frontman Adrian Toubro shouting in the back of my mind: "Walk on heads/ Oppress the crowd/ Throw your bones/ Into their mouths."
If you clicked onto this review with even the slightest of preconceived notions about Lower, you're likely well aware that in 2012 it's impossible to have a conversation about blackened, underground punk without discussing Copenhagen. And the bands that compose that young scene are so intertwined that it's also difficult to talk about them individually without referencing the others. Lower, for example, also includes guitarist Simon Van Formann, who plays in Girlseeker with Iceage's Johan Suurballe Wieth; bassist Kristian Emdal, who plays in VÅR with Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt; and drummer Anton Rothstein, who plays in Sexdrome with VÅR's Loke Rahbek. Recently NME ran a feature on the Copenhagen scene, labeling it "the new heartland of hardcore" and "Hottest Underground Rock Scene," which are at once hilarious ways of putting it and also probably quite accurate.
Walk on Heads adds another dimension to the story, beginning with "Craver", the EP's undeniable highlight. The menacing drum rolls that open the song feel almost like a rotating crank, building tension for the rocket-fire speed that's on the brink of recklessly unwinding over three following tracks. The shrill chords of "Craver" are barely altered throughout, instead focusing on creaking, painfully stretched walls of noise, which suffocate the vague, snarled bassline creeping underneath, delivering faint hints of an oppressed hook.
But what makes "Craver" exceptional is Toubro's lyrics, which pop like dense, ambitious poetry with gray imagery even on paper. They're spit so fast on record you can barely catch them. In a deep and air-deprived fashion, he sings about yearning for a more inspired existence, "ignited by boredom" within "hermetic landscapes," pushed to burn holes through thick clouds to "brighten our vision." This is a classic punk theme, and an excellent topic for a song. There's an intrinsic urgency to it, and Toubro boils that down to an essential, oft-repeated "craving for oxygen." It's a visceral moment that's hard to shake.
And then Toubro describes a burning candle, equating its slow collapse to what sounds like death, conjuring a sense of the draining of time. "A light is lit/ But won't shine forever," and later, "A light is lit/ Soon it'll be dark again." Part of what makes Toubro's lyrics hard to decipher sonically is his Danish inflection. To my American ears, listening to Lower can often feel like hearing music with my face pressed up to a glass window, listening in on a moment so distant it's entirely untouchable. This can heighten the allure of a record in a way that still feels genuine.
A similar concept to "Craver" is at work on "Escape", which plows ahead with the perpetual assault of an uptempo drum beat. In a disillusioned city, within the confines of a bleak, fluorescent-lit room, Toubro grimly shades a "weak, faint, and pallid" character with "inane eyes," engaging in the "fast-fix liberty" of escapism through television. He calls it "a self-inflected genocide," screaming the words violently. But again Toubro moves so rapidly you could miss it all, including his description of the "trench" where he remains, quarantined. There are allusions to war and combat on nearly every Walk on Heads track, but it turns out those references are not the EP's most startling.
"Pictures of Passion" races forward on the heels of "Craver". It moves to a particularly curious and uncomfortable place when Toubro describes an image-- "a relic of fascism"-- depicting passion and purity in "machine-gun fashion." For fans of Iceage, these lines may recall the scrutiny that band underwent last year, over misguided accusations of nationalism, which pointed at drawings from the singer's Dogmeat zine. The images were misinterpreted as strikes against multiculturalism in Denmark, sentiments rekindled when Toubro sings of "[seaming] the beauty that's torn," stitching something back together that's been opened up. This line is followed directly by Toubro's reference to fascism and "hierarchy in the sun," provoking discourse. Lower are hardly the first to appropriate this kind of imagery for shock value. In that pool you'll also find Joy Division, New Order, Death in June, Throbbing Gristle, and David Bowie.
All of which is to say that Walk on Heads is a beguiling listen, one that works the mind in a way few brief, out-of-nowhere punk EPs have managed to in recent memory. Often with scenes like the one that's emerged in Copenhagen, a band can garner value simply for being an important piece of the cultural fabric. But Walk on Heads more than stands its own ground, picking you open for eight minutes, fucking you up, and throwing you down, pining for more. It makes you do a double take, not only at Lower, but at the entire place from which they spawned.
