‘The’s a thousand ways, A thousand ways to pray, There’s a thousand different ways to, To bend down and kiss the ground’ (Bend Down And The Kiss The Ground)

Bend Down And Kiss The Ground explores one of humanity’s most enduring frailties.  Our willingness to take solace in empty promises and knowing refuge in convenient excuses.  From the glib solutions of politicians and the self-serving narratives of populist opportunists to the endless promises of delayed celestial reward.  Anything but to face up to the true causes of our malaise.

Hailing from Nottingham, and featuring members of Army Of Flying Robots, Blind Eye, and Moloch, Bloody Head are back with their follow up to 2024’s Perpetual Eden.  Despite this being the band’s fifth album over the past decade, I must confess that this is my first encounter with them – and I’m rather delighted to have made their acquaintance.

Bend Down And The Kiss Ground sees the band continue to hone a sound that brings a pronounced metallic heft to bear on their already burly post-hardcore heart, and then braids it through elements of doom and sludge, before finishing with a squalling noise rock aesthetic.  It is a powerfully immersive blend and one that Bloody Head handle with an assured confidence, and no little craft.  It evokes, for me at least, shades of both Corrosion Of Conformity’s Blind and The Rollins Band’s The End Of Silence, not least in the shared dynamics of how brooding menace is so deftly married with a slam hard hardcore velocity.

Side one comprises three tracks.  Children Of The Dusk is built around a savagely compelling central riff, while the title track is defined by the sledgehammer rhythm section, before the bleakly ruminative instrumental, Vibratory Affinity.  The flipside features just a single track.  Time, As Veiled Eternity unfurls through three distinct phases.  It opens with wah-wah guitar tones, industrial rhythms, and anarcho-style, semi-shouted vocals, before subsiding into a more introspective passage of spoken word and haunting melody, and then locks into an utterly bludgeoning groove for the finale.

The album spans 32 minutes.  I mention this only because I know many of us get sweaty palms at the thought of hardcore bands getting all prog with their three-minute odysseys.  But you needn’t worry.  The dynamics of the four tracks are constructed and layered with such skill that they never even hint at outstaying their welcome.  Indeed, the end invariably catches you slightly by surprise, so all enveloping is the onslaught.