Iron Head - Fundamental

 

 

Iron Head - Fundamental
Skullism Records - 2026
Stoner, Doom, Psychedelic Rock
Rated: ****¾

Iron Head are a stoner/doom band from Indonesia. They open their first full length album 'Fundamental' with the largely instrumental, 11+ minute title track that has one of the most exciting intro's I've heard in quite a while, slowly building an eerie atmosphere of stretched noise, samples, sound effects and mystical chants. Around the three minute mark the interstellar gates swing open and off they go with psychedelic fuzz sizzling like sausages on a hellish BBQ in outer space, as if they've taken Church of Misery's darkness, attached it to a ragged old rocket and blasted it into an orbit around the sun with a fireball in its wake, metal shields shuddering in sync with the vibrations. This is raw, dirty, nasty and drags you by the hairs through gutters filled with mold-covered feces, used needles and dried-up piss while dealers are lurking in the shadows of abandoned buildings. Different emotions glued together to construct a new entity - one of balled-up anger on a restless day. 

With larger than life grooves, gushing from the belly of the beast, these five guys are an all-out riff monster, breathing fire, burning skulls, leaving you all scared and blistered - and not only on the ultra heavy mid-paced opener, where doom reigns and space rock accents are the frills around the edges. No, they wield their blunt chainsaw all the way through, threatening to separate the limbs from your body while filming the whole scene to proudly show at a nice and cozy family gathering. 'Nafas' for example is a short, Kyuss-influenced speedster that roars past like a horde of murderous motorcycles, while 'War Has Begun' gives a nod to Sleep and Bongzilla, its doom riffs cutting through thick air before a scorching finale. And now we're not even halfway through the album. Smack bang in the middle there's 'Ballad of the Thrills', an exciting, tension-laden doom track with well-placed guitar leads and psychedelic cuts, like a slowed-down version of 'Spine of God'-era Monster Magnet. 

"Yeah right", you might think by know, "it's cool searching for analogies and metaphors all the time and spitting them over us, trying to describe the feel of this album, but what about the execution?" Well, I can tell you the guitars are low tuned, crunchy, distorted, fuzz-driven excellence, the bass chops & chugs along nicely, almost casually throwing around small parts of humanity and melody, while the drums provide a steady, slightly frantic foundation and the sound effects (courtesy of the singer) bring some nuances to the game. It all works perfectly and you can feel the chemistry at work here. That goes for the vocals as well. They are rough, raunchy and often growling from the nether regions of a freshly desecrated grave. The lyrics are more or less split even between English and their native Indonesian language, although it's sometimes hard to notice which of the two is at the forefront. 

Okay, so much for the formal intermezzo. Back to the music when 'Pitam' hits the speakers with its fiery stoner attitude, cruising through a newly discovered landscape called the desert swamp, cacti growing from muddy waters, broadleaf sand trees guarding the path to infinity that's popping up somewhere in the distance. But first we got to wade through something called 'Raga', that feels like it's pushing you forward and holding you back at the exact same time, like you're running with supermassive super glue under your shoes, trying to speed things up but getting stuck with every step. It's exciting and the rhythm section in the end exemplifies this feeling, fading out before album closer 'Rock Stoned' opens in true Sons of Otis fashion - slow, haunting doom, a bass line that summons Lilith and the devil for a massive bacchanal on planet earth and spoken (movie?) samples that lure you into a weird encounter. And that's only the first half. The second half brings things back down to earth with a bunch of  skeletons speeding down the highway on the motorcycles that passed us by earlier and which they managed to grab a hold of and domesticate before riding off into the sunset, closing the portal gates behind them and leaving us here, all ravaged and beat-up, roaming the earth like the so-called humans we are. 

(Written by Ronny Dijksterhuis)

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