Heavy Winged "Enough Rope" review

As longtime Voguing to Danzig readers know, I regularly offer links to my articles here once they’ve hit the web. But, like, I submitted the review below to a frequently updated website that I’ve been writing for years three frickin’ months ago and it hasn’t been published yet. Three months! With print magazines that’s normal and understandable. Here, not so much, and I’m tired of asking the editor what’s up. It wouldn’t feel like so much of a big deal if the label wasn’t based in the Netherlands and hadn’t sent me this disc and another one, and if the label guy, a kindly fellow ILM poster, hadn’t sent the package to me at my personal request. Granted, the CD is long sold out, but fair is fair. Not hating on the editor, who will remain nameless and has got a lot on his plate and maybe just lost the email message. Whatever – here’s the review in question:

Heavy Winged
Enough Rope
(Cut Hands)

Yeah, I know – Enough Rope is already sold out, and it ain’t fair, you’d just now heard of Heavy Winged, etc. Get used to it; that’s just how this Brooklyn, NY/Portland, OR trio rolls. Dudes’ conceit seems to be “watch this space” – their myspace – “and pounce with your PayPal bounce as soon as we announce our latest improvised-straight-to-tape, limited-to-50-copies cdr/lp/cassette.” It’s a blink-and-you’re-outta-luck dare, a tease, and it’s worth the temptation because Heavy Winged are downright psych-o-pathic. A 4-track recording of the band’s only show to date – Brooklyn, sometime in June 2006 - Rope falls somewhere between shred-y metal and outright noise. “Varcolac 1” finds guitarist Ryan Hebert generating a violent, vascillating vibration which must have required a rec room full of pedals, because there’s more ax wildin’ happening at the same time – contemplative plinks and otherworldly drones filling the space where bassist Brady Sansone and drummer Jen Binderman should’ve been, though one wonders if their parts were simply expirated by Hebert’s full-court press. At first, “Varcolac 2” looks to be another Hebert showboat, albeit more narrowly murderous, until his bandmates’ thump arrives in time for the chordage to become crudely flashy, the three elements punching away at your brainstem. On “Varcolac 3” the three decompress, slipping into a spacious, dirge-y almost-jazz groove that’s as much a relief for us as it is for them, but by “Varcolac 4” the heat’s back up for a balls-out, run-on denoucement so full-tilt and white-hot that you’ll question whether you were even actually even awake - or alive - prior to experiencing it.