Bedhead

The Bedhead trio, composed of brothers Bubba and Matt Kadane and guitarist Tench Coxe (all from Dallas), debuted in 1993 with Bedside Table (Direct Hit), followed by The Rest Of The Day (Direct Hit). Bedside Table lingers on the gentle lullaby theme of the guitar: there is a constant impression that the piece should explode at any moment, yet the guitar continues to cradle you sweetly with its wave-like progression, and the climax happens only two seconds before the end. The Rest Of The Day is even more restrained, stripped of vitality, teetering on the edge of nervous exhaustion.

Unlike their psychedelic peers—half immersed in avant-garde experiments and half emulating the masters of the ’60s—Bedhead found an original formula: building melodies through “successive refinements,” adding chords gradually to a harmonic framework that initially is nothing more than a shaky motif. The character of each song thus takes shape slowly, as if the band were initially embarrassed by what they were about to play and needed time to gain confidence; or as if they rehearsed in private and only after several measures ventured into the full piece; or as if they intended a “gradual” listening strategy for the song.

On the album What Fun Life Was (Trance, 1994), songs like Liferaft and Living Well only become fully realized after a painful process of growth: they are slow crescendos of a psychedelic chant dragging along a methodical light-boogie cadence amid a clatter of cymbals; after three minutes, they turn into intense, deafening jams. This method is successfully applied to trance in tracks like Powder, which evoke Velvet Underground instrumentals performed by a group of half-hearted musicians.
One of Bedhead’s favorite tempos is the waltz, which permeates the more forceful melody of Haywire as well as Foaming Love. Another is the style of old-timey tunes, such as the almost 1920s ragtime strum of The Unpredictable Landlord or the whistlable skiffle of To The Ground, two gags reminiscent of a minimalist version of the Violent Femmes. All of this is filtered through a sensibility akin to the Jesus And Mary Chain.

The EP 4 Song CD EP 19:10 (Trance, 1994) contains prehistoric material, recorded live in a church in 1990–91. The EP Dark Ages (Trance, 1996) better showcases the band’s twisted and melancholic personality. Any Life and Dark Ages are two of their most poetic compositions, while the instrumental Inhume is transcendent like a raga.

The songs on Beheaded (Trance Syndicate, 1996) date practically from the same period as the first album and, indeed, replicate its velvety trance, halfway between the dreamy country of the Cowboy Junkies and the melancholic psychedelia of Mazzy Star. The languid tolling of the guitars (starting with Tench Coxe’s) and the soft chant of Matt or Bubba Kadane, accompanied by the imperceptible swing of the rhythm section, express a resigned despair, aware of the mysterious web connecting individual and society. Here and there, one can even sense the ghost of Tim Buckley. The funereal pace of Beheaded, the tender progression of Left Behind, the imperceptible lament of Burned Out, and the listless ending of Losing Memories paint an increasingly depopulated, intimate, and profound landscape. The mood brightens in a few spots, in the martial Smoke, which could be Neil Young, and the gentle Withdraw, almost pop. The emotional peak of the album may be the melody of What's Missing, cradled in serene chords. The only flaw is a certain compositional laziness that prevents the nightmare from becoming vision. The album includes a remake of their second single, Rest Of The Day, originally released over two years earlier.

Matt Kadane had somewhat exhausted the things he wanted to “say” (more than “sing”) in his subdued whisper. On Transaction De Novo (Trance Syndicate, 1997), he therefore decided to entrust his music to that underground concert of scattered but brightly colored chords that he has always carried from song to song. Exhume opens the ceremony in the most funereal manner, with a voice barely above silence over a tinkling of bells and triangle, and soon after it is plunged into depression by the prolonged emptiness of Forgetting; but More Than Ever is (relatively speaking) a lively and optimistic song, and Half Thought, with its airy motif over a relaxed rhythm, could be by the Magnetic Fields. Extramundane is a measured power-pop (not far from the sunny songs of Luna), and the instrumental Psychosomatica is almost hard-rock. Perhaps Kadane is trying to communicate to a wider audience, or perhaps he does not want to be trapped in a narrow genre.
Ultimately, Kadane gives us the best at the end. The poignant lullaby of The Present takes a full four minutes to take shape through a slow guitar strum, then stretches for three minutes into a gentle music-box. It is a new way of constructing a song, of showing how a song is born and evolves, playing it in the same incremental way it was composed, little by little.

The band dissolved shortly after the album’s release.

Bubba and Matt Kadane took a while to regroup, but eventually surfaced with New Year, featuring Codeine's Chris Brokaw on drums, Saturnine's Mike Donofrio on bass and Peter Schmidt on guitar. Newness Ends (Subpop, 2001) embraces a more robust sound, bringing the melody to the forefront and fast-forwarding the pace to the edge of power-pop. Sweet litanies like Half A Day, Great Expectations and Alter Ego still hover at the border between Red House Painters and Leonard Cohen, but the smooth, dreamy aria of Gasoline concocts a vision of Lou Reed fronting the Smiths (One Plus One Minus One Equals One is virtually a rewrite of Sweet Jane), and the waltzing, whirling, hypnotic Newness Ends borrows equally from Neil Young and the Velvet Underground. While the loud and noisy rave-ups sound out of context and out of balance, the added verve and more complex texture introduces new intriguing variables in Bedhead's chemical equation.

For Bedhead's Loved Macha (Jetset, 2000), a very fragmented and self-indulgent mini-album, Bubba and Matt Kadane join forces with Macha.

Music From The Film Hell House (Pleximusic, 2004) is a soundtrack composed by Matt and Bubba Kadane.

New Year's second album, The End Is Near (Touch And Go, 2004), has little to add to the first one: generic alt-rock that mimicks the main reference points of the 1990s. The salient feature of their music is the way guitars and piano trade elements of a melody until the refrain/hook soars like an iceberg on an icy ocean. The problem with their music is that it is mostly about the process, not the tune, and the process tends to become monotonous after a few songs. New Year's third album, The New Year (Touch And Go, 2008), de facto abandoned the slocore format that they had pursued throughout their career and presented them as conventional (albeit subtle and elegant) rockers.