Most of the rock subgenres we reference today were coined between the 1980s and '90s. If you were living in the English-speaking world, rap aside, music played with guitars was still more or less the main game in town during this era, so "rock" in the broadest sense had no choice but to mutate: noise-rock, post-punk, dream-pop. In lieu of entirely new tools—no computers yet—independent rock got more specific and it got weirder, splintering in any number of different directions.
Bedhead, a five-piece band from Wichita Falls, Texas, a town about a two-hour drive from Dallas, were one of the '90s bands who pushed rock into new places. They were sometimes called slowcore and sometimes post-rock and they had elements of both of those sounds. They were only around for about five years, they put out three full-lengths, a few EPs, and some singles, and, despite making music with the same guitar/bass/drum set-up everyone else was using, they had a distinctive aesthetic. Bedhead also more or less slipped out of the conversation after winding down at the end of the '90s. People who were there remember them fondly, people who were not have probably never heard of them. This box set from Numero, which gathers everything they recorded in a deluxe remastered set, is designed to change that.
Bedhead had certain parallels with Galaxie 500 that are hard to deny: Both groups put out three LPs plus a handful of other releases, both often played in slower tempos, both featured quiet/loud surges, both covered Joy Division on record convincingly, and both have the guitar at the center of their sound. But Bedhead were never "dreamy"; their music was dry and clear and grounded. Though it probably sounds very good on certain kinds of drugs, it’s not drug music. Despite the explosions of guitar and surges of grandeur, this wasn’t psychedelia; Bedhead were about the beauty of form, what happens when every note and every sound is in the right place.
When a band mixes vocals low so it’s hard to hear the words, I tend to trust that they have their reasons, and I’m less likely to spend time trying to figure out what the words mean. Which is to say I was able to get deeply into Bedhead years ago without really knowing what the lyrics were about. The vocals, sung by one of the two brothers on guitar and voice, Matt and Bubba Kadane, were delivered in kind of a half-whispered sing-speak register. At times, they were reminiscent of how Brian McMahan used his voice on Slint’s Spiderland, but Bedhead seemed less performed, more about executing a composition than inhabiting a moment. Every time you hear Bedhead vocals you imagine them coming from behind a black curtain, and in the case of this band that curtain was made up of the 22 strings—three guitars, one bass.
Returning to the albums with this set I learned that, despite how quiet the vocals could be, Bedhead songs are filled with interesting thoughts, and more to the point they seem like exactly the sort of lyrics that should be gracing this sort of music. In my head I’ve always bracketed Bedhead with Talk Talk—sonic perfectionists who aren’t afraid to be serious and studied and trust their audience to hear sincerity instead of pretension. And like that band, their lyrics are about existential questions and spiritual emptiness, about feeling like a tiny speck in an endless universe. The title of "Liferaft" actually refers to a bed, a place for sitting alone in the dark and dreaming and wondering about the nature of your own existence; "The Unpredictable Landlord" and "Unfinished" alternately get angry at God and then poke fun at him; "Bedside Table" zeroes in on a moment where the physical world meets the life of the mind. There’s something about all of these songs that is both evocative and just slightly out of reach, making you wonder if unsolved puzzles can be true.
But Bedhead were always about music first. Each instrument had its role to play. I’ll start with Trini Martinez’s drums. Where a funk band plays off the hi-hat and a heavier rock band leans on the crash, Bedhead were all about the ride cymbal, steadily marking time, never in too much of a hurry, always aware that something big is looming in the distance but certain that they’ll get there. The ride points the way through many of the best tracks here, and its linear presence reinforces that Bedhead songs never had much in the way of verses, choruses, and bridges; instead, their music was about addition and subtraction, exploring the terrain between potential maximum volume and utter silence.
Above all else, Bedhead were about composition, the way the guitar parts overlapped and braided around each other and fell away at just the right time. The earliest recordings, 7''s gathered here on an album with EPs and B-sides, found them having their sound completely mapped out from the jump. Every song on this singles/rarities set, for better or worse (and I’d argue it’s much more for the better), even the cover of Joy Division’s "Disorder", is instantly identifiable as Bedhead. They staked out the boundaries of an aesthetic, and they were not particularly wide boundaries; differences between their albums are subtle. But they explored every inch of terrain inside of them.
After those early singles they assembled for WhatFunLifeWas, their debut full-length. With a band like this, who made records of uniform quality and never deviated much from a core sound, the first record you hear by them tends to be your favorite. In my case, that is WhatFunLifeWas, which also happens to be their most intensely dynamic. Relative to the two albums that followed, WhatFunLifeWas is less about mood and precision and more about extreme shifts in volume and density. Some of the most beautiful guitar parts they ever created are here; the nature of Bedhead’s genius, and one of the serious advantages they had in having three guitarists, is that they could take several things that make guitars such a powerful instrument and make them happen simultaneously. So a track like "Powder" might have furious strumming, a soft drone, and a lead line in counterpoint all happening at once, growing and changing as it unwinds.
Beheaded, their second album, from 1996, is the hardest of the three to get a handle on. Much of the brightness and surges of joy found on the first album are gone, but the space and precision of their third, Transaction de Novo, haven’t quite arrived. The thorough (and very good) notes by Matt Gallaway describe it as their darkest record, but that feels like a question of a half a shade or so. It was recorded by Adam Wiltzie, of fellow Texans Stars of the Lid, and it’s probably their least distinctive recording on a purely sonic level, but the highlights—"Roman Candle"’s gentle jangle, the searing throb of "Withdraw"—are up there with anything the band did.
Given the kind of music they made and their aesthetic values, it was inevitable that Bedhead would work with Steve Albini. Both band and engineer agreed on how to make a great recording of a rock band: You get a decent guitar, pair it with the right amp, figure out how to play it. You put the amp and guitar in a room that gives it a certain resonance. You find the right microphone, and you put it in the place where it will give you the desired mix of direct and reflected sound. Then you set your levels and record until you get the performance you’re looking for. It’s a process based on getting the essentials right rather than figuring out the latest tricks.
The subtle differences on Transaction show how small changes in an environment of great consistency can evoke a disproportionate amount of feeling. The glockenspiel that rings so clearly in the opening is so fragile it almost hurts; they’d used the instrument before, but never with such clarity, and the tiny shift is devastating. Transition is also more judicious with its massive crescendos; there are fewer, but when they come, they hit with much greater force. The album is a tapestry of interlocking single-note parts, a celebration of the emotional possibility of guitar tone. Here they finally started to explore genre: "Extramundane" showcases the jittery Feelies influence that was always lurking beneath the surface, and they never rocked as convincingly; "Forgetting" adds some slide guitar and finally adds a country and western wrinkle. The closing "The Present" finished the album—and Bedhead’s recording career—in brilliant style, with a lyric that riffs on both gifts and moment-to-moment alienation, while the music features bowed strings, formalizing the classical undercurrent that was always there. Together, Albini and Bedhead made the band’s best record, going out on a high note.
Numero is embarking on an interesting project with boxes like this one, and the ones for Unwound and Codeine. These are American indie rock bands that have mostly been missed by people now under 30. They didn’t play the reunion tours, and they weren’t all that high profile in the first place. They were also bands that just barely touched on the early Internet, meaning they were a little too new to be canonized in, say the Spin or Trouser Press guides, but old enough that only a small percentage of the online coverage they received early on still remains. For people who loved these records then, having them back in print, in high quality sets, is welcome. They serve as a reminder of how interesting guitar music could be at this particular time and place.
As to how this Bedhead set might strike your average listener born in the 1990s, it’s harder to say. The beauty of the guitar arrangements of, say, Real Estate, sometimes reminds me of what Bedhead were up to; but even Real Estate is anomalous now, the band you go to for this sort of sound instead of being one of many. Some of that is up to how big these bands were in the first place, and some of that is up to whether or not they had any kind of sexy mystique; Bedhead had no time for or interest in anything extraneous to the music, which in itself is a marker of another era. And this is what it sounded like—serious, intense, smart, beautiful, occasionally frightening—when a band approached their work with that kind of deep focus.
