Open Head should be turning new heads their direction this coming weekend when they make their first appearance at the returning eclectic music and arts fest, Basilica Soundscape. The Hudson Valley is no foreign place to them, as the four-piece of vocalist and guitarist Jared Ashdown, bassist Jonathan McCarthy, prepared guitarist Brandon Minnervini, and drummer Daniel Schwartz hail a stone’s throw away from Kingston, with the area’s brutalist architecture reinforcing the structure to their art on their first single since signing to Wharf Cat Recods, “Catacomb”. “All the things you said it wouldn’t be / It was!,” protests Ashdown at one point in the listen. That’s true to a certain extent of its political connotations between the oppressive and the depressive states of our current systems, but not in the way their sound moves through you. The industrial noise complex Open Head manufacture these thoughts, on the surface, feel cold and heavy, yet Schwartz’s Moroccan Rai-influenced rhythmic liaison between these metaphorical cement walls and the idea that something better await us, if only we could break through them. It would be something if they were real rather than an illusion of a trickster god, fading away…

Open Head’s “Catacomb” is available now on Wharf Cat Records.