Head Wound City

Welcome to Head Wound City, now die alone in the street, skull crushed flat by the bumper of that yellow cab you didn’t see coming—the one with wheels made of cyanide-laced donuts, and GG Allin’s grinning ghost grinding the gears. Jordan does the singing. Gabe plays drums. Cody does guitar stuff. So does Nick. JP plays bass. Most everybody sings along. They’ve been in some of the bands that have burned out the backs of your eyeballs, Yeah Yeah Yeahing you into a jitter sex frenzy, Locusting your flesh down to bare white bones, and spurting Blood Brothers all over your clean white sheets. It was always fun, though, wasn’t it? We always came back for more, did we not?
The new record is an EP, written and recorded in a week’s time. (That same week you stayed inside mostly, jacking off to Suicide Girls and IMing your idiot friends.) It opens with a death squall of feedback, 48 seconds of pure white noise bleed, before Jordan busts in the frontdoor, running past you, chased by a barrage of blast beat missiles, screaming surrealist madtalk about holding hands in a head wound city.
It’s seven songs in nine minutes, 41 seconds. Gruesome brutality laid against twitchy speed metal licks and classic punk austerity, a huge combo clusterfuck. As says Blood Brothers singer Jordan Blilie, “It's kind of like if Alien and Predator started a band instead of fighting each other.”
The band began, as all good things, with a drunk dial. “The idea started in London after Blood Brothers played with Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” says the latter’s guitarist Nick Zinner. “Jordan and I were talking about Violent Ramp, the skate thrash band that some dudes from Wolf Eyes do, and we thought it would be really fun to do one ourselves. We drunk dialed JP and said he and Gabe were in our band.”
Blood Brothers guitarist Cody Votolato backs him up, “We wanted to play music together and we had the chance to do it. There was really no other motivation than to play music with friends.”
But considering how the best laid plans of drunk dialers go, Nick says he was surprised when the band actually happened. “I think we were all really surprised that we all had a week free where we could actually do it. It seems everyone always talks about doing projects together, but only about 5% of those drunken ideas are ever realized. I just hope we can all find the time to write more songs and tour.”
More songs, touring, or not, these drunken ideas want to come to human form, sprout ugly, stumpy arms and legs and roll you off the pier wearing cement shoes. Second track, “I’m a Taxidermist—I’ll Stuff Anything” is pure headbanger flipout with Jordan chanting intelligent profanity and clapping his hands like a protest-leader. Next one, “Prick Class,” breaks down with a slow, heavy grind section, horrormovie-ing along with feedback shrieks and birdlike death gasps.
Less than 10 minutes later, it’s over, and by then you’ve either ran for the hills with a backpack full of Bibles, Chicken McNuggets, and bottled water or you’re right in there with the band, busting out Hummer windows with skatedecks and tearing open folks’ throats with your teeth just ‘cuz–I dunno—it’s 2008, war’s still raging, and nobody’s snuffed Bush yet. What else are you gonna do?

Head Wound City is a hardcore supergroup consisting of Jordan Blilie and Cody Votolato of The Blood Brothers, Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Justin Pearson and Gabe Serbian from The Locust. Their debut self-titled EP was released in 2005 on Three One G.