The Bald Headbang.

I have my fingers crossed for a revolution in headbanging as we know it. Enough with the hair already!

Since the dawn of metal, headbaning presupposed that the headbanger had a disgusting long greasy mess of hair that would be able to bob and sway along with your garden variety heavy metal rhythm. The typical metal concert features a room full of sweaty chubby dudes proudly wearing their favorite Slayer shirt and nodding their thicket of hair along with the music, sometimes quite violently. There wasn't really much room for variety within this simple formula: hairz + metalz = headbanz. Sometimes there was more swirling action, or sometimes, in more extreme circumstances, the headbanger would need to bend over to allow for more room and slightly different angles of attack. No matter how you did it, it was dumb, cliche and tacky.

But my opinions about headbanging were thrown out the window the moment I laid my eyes upon Torche's video for "King Beef" (most notably starting at 0:57ish) --

The way that Steve Brooks wildly throws his dome around in this video, to me, is far more "metal" than unkempt hair waving about. It seems like a more natural and visceral way to "dance" to heavy metal music. I think it largely has to do with the fact that you can see the outline of Brooks' skull more clearly with a shaved head, and hair just kind of masks that little detail. And I know I'm probably the only one that was THIS fascinated by the music video, but I just had to get it out.

I'm sad to admit that I've never seen Torche live. I've been a fan for quite a while, but I've just never heard of them coming through my area. I recently also heard Steve Brooks' other band Floor reunited and will be doing some touring in 2011, perhaps I'll have to check them out. I'll be the only person there looking forward to some bald headbanging...

Also, I would just like to toss in here that this has to be my all-time favorite Torche track. The group lost founding member Juan Montoya in 2008, and "King Beef" was one of the first tracks Torche wrote as a three-piece. Coming off of success of the critically acclaimed Meanderthal, the group tossed out a few EPs and things here and there. This track happens to be from a split release with Japanese band Boris. The song "King Beef" was really interesting to me with its tribal-sounding marching rhythm of a drum beat and the interesting space that's created when the rest of the instruments start and stop so frequently. The tempo seems to shift up and down a lot also. It just seemed very unconventional and very interesting and I hoped to hear more tracks like this on the Songs for Singles EP. But I was mildly disappointed by that release. Oh well.

Long live bald headbanging!