The Baptist's Head Compendium Chapman

Everybody loves a good ol’ dumping on bedroom projects. Ain’t nuthin like tearin’ instrudjental solo guitarists a new one for how generic their riffs are, and repeating for the thousandth time that soloing dost not the songwriting maketh (think, djenter, think!). On the flipside though, whenever a solo artist does come out with something worthwhile, it becomes all the more impressive. Enter The Vicious Head Society, a solo project by Graham Keane. Now to call this an actual solo project may be a bit of a stretch given the plethora of session musicians featured on this, but all the writing and composing is done by Keane. This band has been on my radar for a while since they were featured on a Reddit series for underrated prog metal artists, so I was excited to finally have an excuse to listen to them as I saw that they had a new one coming up. So the perennial question is of course, does it live up to my own personal hype?

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

In 1969 British singer/songwriter Michael Chapman took the U.K.'s folk-rock world by surprise with his debut album, Rainmaker, on the Harvest label. In an era when each week garnered a new surprise in the music world, gathering serious and widespread critical acclaim wasn't easy, and finding a buying public near impossible. Rainmaker showcases a new talent who holds nothing back for himself. Every songwriting principle and trick, killer guitar riff, and songwriting hook in his bag makes an appearance here (something he would never do again). As a result, there are several truly striking things about the album that makes it stand out from the rest of the Brit folk-rock slog from the late '60s. One of them is Chapman's guitar playing.

This music, the album EB=MC2 and Chapman and Banai’s concerts together before that can ultimately be traced back to two valleys. One near Hawnby, North Yorkshire, lush green and full of trees, the other, more austere, in northern Galilee. Michael Chapman, paying his way through Art College in the early ’60s worked as a woodsman on the North Yorkshire Mexborough estate in the summer breaks and found inspiration for classics like “In the Valley” and “Among the Trees,” leaning against the trees with his guitar. Slightly later, Ehud Banai spent an extended reflective period in the ’70s, alone near Rosh Pina in Galilee, with his guitar, a ghetto blaster and one cassette. On that inspirational cassette was Michel Chapman’s 1969 Fully Qualified Survivor album. Travel forward over 30 years to 2012, and Ehud, now a successful musician with a string of his own albums, is playing The 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street in London.