Austin Sound

When Headdress first wandered into Austin two years ago, they appeared on the scene like a dusty desert mirage, a pair of nomadic shamans droning delicate and mesmerizing tones. With a guitar and organ combo, Caleb Coy and Ethan Cook delivered shimmering psych-folk pulsing in waves of reverb upon a hypnotically contorted bed of blues. 2007’s impressive sophomore disk, Turquoise, and Headdress’ recently released Lunes on No Quarter, captured the duo’s tuned-in and dropped-out interplay, but Coy has since opened the group to take on various players during the live shows, expanding the band’s sound while making the intricate psychedelic improvisation all the more intriguing. Catch Coy and company live this Friday, August 21, as Headdress opens for Woods and Sweden’s Dungen at the Mohawk.

The folk-droning duo of Headdress just released their sophomore album this week, Lunes, on the No Quarter label, and they have offered up this song to share. The album seems to certainly be more harnessed, but no less entrancing their excellent, self-released 2007 debut, Turquoise. This is some truly epic stuff - a shamanistic psychedelic meditation through the desert, filled with some fantastically hypnotic guitar that shoots like morphine straight to your marrow. While “The Lost White Brother” carries an ominous undercurrent, it’s impossible not to be drawn into the mellow haze of Ethan Cook’s organ playing off of Caleb Coy’s guitar (wait, that didn’t sound right at all!). The duo doesn’t currently have any local dates lined up in support of the release, and given their nomadic nature, we’re not even exactly sure where they might be right now, but definitely check out this track below, and you can order the 1000 copy limited vinyl of Lunes here.

Headdress is a nomadic folk duo that has been camping out in Austin for the latter half of 2007, after spending the last two years traversing through the southwest. The group’s mystical travels and restless spirit is well-represented on their breezy full-length debut, Turquoise (Totem Songs), which was supposedly recorded underground in Arizona and is sewn at its seams and individually numbered through 250. At times recalling the pastoral roaming and freak folk of contemporaries like Brightblack Morning Light, MV + EE, and Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, the album more closely resembles the dark side of Neil Young’s Harvest, a somber and stripped-down meditation on the roots of Americana and blues. Call it hill country psych, born under a bad sign.