Heads on Sticks

The term "bedroom recording project" carries connotations that don't really apply to Heads on Sticks. Still, that's how the story starts with the bizarre bursts Birds of Avalon bassist David Mueller pieces together on his own time. Birds of Avalon rocks as hard as its mostly classic restraints will allow, bending tones and time signatures the way hallucinogens bend minds. Calling Heads on Sticks Mueller's bedroom outlet paints it as his time to relax, a space to abandon the furious pace and sound of his other project and to indulge in ruminating excursions. Heads on Sticks is not such a project.

While it's created with a markedly different set of tools, its impact is every bit as fevered as the Birds'. Mueller's work is a viciously controlled, unceasingly fun bricolage of parts that wouldn't really make sense together in any other context. It's all built on the back of psychedelic rock, sure, always riding beefy bass lines that use rhythm as the dominant force. But other elements light in and out—a techno-light keyboard part here, a warped field recording there, with laser gun riffs popping up from around corners only to be trampled under the boots of drum machines. Everything sticks right to the beat, shifting in and out with the precision of the best DJ sets.

Indeed, Mueller's most recent recordings don't really operate as songs in the traditional sense. Like the work of a DJ, they tie together different bits to create a vibe, to establish and maintain momentum. The elements move differently, shifting with the eerie cadences of '60s psych, but it all pops and rattles with dance-club energy. Heads on Sticks may have started as Mueller's bedroom project, but there's nothing sleepy about it. —Jordan Lawrence