Album cover of Comfort in Illusion.
“Of Uncertainty,” the first track from Head With Wings’s new album Comfort in Illusion, starts as the title implies, drums, bass, guitars, and vocals each occupying their own space, the atmosphere around them uneasy. The melody carries words that reflect the musical mood: “From where I’m holding down / relentless / protecting my / relaxation / or so I thought / I began to question it all,” Joshua Corum sings. “Doubt from within / strangled my wits / to choke out the best part of my being / I fed it backwards / back towards my gut / yet I still hunger.”
Then the band — Corum on vocals and guitar, Andrew Testa on drums, Brandon Cousino on guitars, Steve Hill on bass, and Mike Short on guitars — sharpens the edge of the music as Corum heads into the chorus: “Yet I’m not broken / bent at the knees / though I’ve been here before / don’t you judge me / while I’m pushing for change / sound the alarms because I am awake.”
The New Haven-based band’s song sounds tailor-made for the political upheaval of 2020, but as the liner notes reveal, the album was recorded between December 2019 and March 2020, just as the pandemic began. It delivers the crackle of energy and ideas, the intelligence and the emotion, that fans of the band’s previous release, 2018’s From Worry to Shame, have been waiting for.
And then, the expanded edition of this EP takes an interesting detour. The next track is billed as a “remix” of “Of Uncertainty” by Asheville, N.C.-based composer Vikram Shankar, but it’s more like a dramatic reworking, as Shankar replaces the band’s rock instrumentation, and Corum’s vocals, with piano and synthesized strings. The results are revelatory. First, it’s evidence that Head With Wings’s songwriting doesn’t rely on its original context to work; the melodies and harmonies, shifts in energy and mood, don’t need to be played on distorted electric instruments and drums to be powerful. They stand on their own, even transported to a small orchestral context. But the changed context reveals another facet to the music, too. Even with the lyrics removed, Shankar’s take on “Of Uncertainty” brings to the surface the vulnerability and raw honesty that run beneath the strength and defiance of the original.
The juxtaposition works again with the band’s and Shankar’s takes on the song “In a House without Clocks.” In the Head with Wings recording of it, the song is gnarly, intricate, and urgent, with the quintet unleashing its full progressive-rock fury while Corum’s lyrics invoke destructive imagery to lay bare an emotional truth. “Go down in flames or claw your way out / I can only see one way out / Go down in flames or claw your way out,” he sings.
Shankar’s take on the same song is a counterweight, finding in the music itself — the music as it might appear on the page — a serene soul.
Head with Wings and Shankar pair up for a final song, “Contemplating the Loop,” and fill out the EP with instrumental versions of the songs. All of it finds the band in as fine a form as ever, still exploring and refining their sound — making it a good taste of what we might expect when the New Haven outfit starts off the night for touring metal bands Moon Tooth and Loss Becomes at the Space Ballroom on Aug. 5. The dovetailing of the album’s themes and the current place the country finds itself may be a coincidence, but in any case, the honesty in the lyrics and the return of clubs to regularly scheduled shows puts new layers on the phrase “opening up.”
The expanded edition of Comfort in Illusion by Head with Wings is available on Bandcamp. Tickets are available for the Aug. 5 show with Moon Tooth and Loss Becomes now.
