Your Ears Have Been Bad And Need To Be Punished Records – MyEars002
The Janitors met while actually working as janitors, but nothing on Head Honcho suggests an enthusiasm for spotless surfaces. Jonas Eriksson and Henric Herlenius prefer music with dirt embedded in it: feedback, overloaded guitar, buried vocals, repetition and sounds left rough enough to retain their physical edges. After an early incarnation inspired by the Jesus and Mary Chain, a long hiatus and a troubled first album, the pair created their own label and studio so they could work without an outside engineer trying to brighten the singing or scrub the distortion away. Head Honcho captures the moment that independence became a fully developed sound. The riffs are direct and occasionally catchy, but every recognizable shape is surrounded by enough drone and fuzz to make it appear dangerous.
The brief “Head Honcho Pt.1” opens the door before “Strap Me Down” establishes the record’s central method: a heavy groove repeated until it stops feeling like a riff and becomes the room itself. The Janitors call their music stökpsych, roughly suggesting messy or unruly psychedelia, and the term is more accurate than polished labels such as shoegaze or neo-psych. Their effects do not create a beautiful cloud that conceals the band. They make the instruments seem larger, dirtier and less stable. Herlenius has explained that the group treats vocals as another instrument, deliberately covering them in delay so they glue themselves to the background rather than standing crisply above it. The words may blur, but the voice’s exhaustion, menace and strange invitation remain perfectly clear.
The twelve-and-a-half-minute “A-Bow” is the EP’s great black hole. It began with a recording Jonas made of an actual archery bow tuned to A, an unlikely little vibration from which the guitar riff appeared almost immediately. The band then circles that figure with bass pressure, drums, wah-wah and accumulating noise, trusting monotony to deepen rather than flatten the experience. It has the forward persistence of Loop or Spacemen 3, but the rhythm carries a crooked boogie that keeps the music connected to the body. This is where The Janitors separate themselves from groups that use fuzz mainly as period clothing. The sound is not an imitation of a lost psychedelic year. It is a tool for changing the scale of the present moment, making one riff feel wide enough to contain an entire hostile landscape.
“MSSG” condenses that atmosphere into less than four minutes. Its vocal has sometimes been compared to Ian Curtis, but the surrounding guitar is too swollen and unstable for ordinary post-punk severity. The song reveals the pop instinct hiding underneath the punishment. Eriksson and Herlenius love noise and monotony, but they also understand that a memorable phrase gives distortion something to deform. Their best music never asks the listener to choose between hook and drone. The hook draws you inward; the drone closes the exit. “Head Honcho Pt.2” then completes the frame without providing a clean return to ordinary daylight. The title may imply leadership, but the record has no obvious boss. Voice, riff, rhythm and feedback continually exchange control until the whole piece behaves like one badly wired organism.
The EP was created in only three months and began with no prepared blueprint. “Strap Me Down” and “MSSG” emerged through jamming, while “A-Bow” grew from its namesake recording. That history explains why Head Honcho feels discovered rather than manufactured, but the final result is not shapeless. The Janitors had learned how to recognize which accidents deserved repetition and when a jam had found its actual center. Their home-recording process allowed them to keep experimenting until the equipment behaved according to their own hearing. It also marked a return to the exploratory duo at the band’s core, with other musicians contributing as needed rather than determining a permanent conventional lineup.
Head Honcho and the preceding Worker Drone Queen EP were later joined on the double album Drone Head, which carried The Janitors beyond their Swedish circle and helped establish their reputation as “peddlers of heavy drones and fuzzed nightmares.” Heard alone, Head Honcho remains especially concentrated: twenty-eight minutes in which a tiny bow vibration becomes a massive psychedelic structure, vocals disappear into their own echoes and boogie is dragged through enough darkness to emerge almost shamanic. The Janitors do not clean the room. They switch off the lights, increase the volume and reveal that the dirt has been moving all along.
The brief “Head Honcho Pt.1” opens the door before “Strap Me Down” establishes the record’s central method: a heavy groove repeated until it stops feeling like a riff and becomes the room itself. The Janitors call their music stökpsych, roughly suggesting messy or unruly psychedelia, and the term is more accurate than polished labels such as shoegaze or neo-psych. Their effects do not create a beautiful cloud that conceals the band. They make the instruments seem larger, dirtier and less stable. Herlenius has explained that the group treats vocals as another instrument, deliberately covering them in delay so they glue themselves to the background rather than standing crisply above it. The words may blur, but the voice’s exhaustion, menace and strange invitation remain perfectly clear.
The twelve-and-a-half-minute “A-Bow” is the EP’s great black hole. It began with a recording Jonas made of an actual archery bow tuned to A, an unlikely little vibration from which the guitar riff appeared almost immediately. The band then circles that figure with bass pressure, drums, wah-wah and accumulating noise, trusting monotony to deepen rather than flatten the experience. It has the forward persistence of Loop or Spacemen 3, but the rhythm carries a crooked boogie that keeps the music connected to the body. This is where The Janitors separate themselves from groups that use fuzz mainly as period clothing. The sound is not an imitation of a lost psychedelic year. It is a tool for changing the scale of the present moment, making one riff feel wide enough to contain an entire hostile landscape.
“MSSG” condenses that atmosphere into less than four minutes. Its vocal has sometimes been compared to Ian Curtis, but the surrounding guitar is too swollen and unstable for ordinary post-punk severity. The song reveals the pop instinct hiding underneath the punishment. Eriksson and Herlenius love noise and monotony, but they also understand that a memorable phrase gives distortion something to deform. Their best music never asks the listener to choose between hook and drone. The hook draws you inward; the drone closes the exit. “Head Honcho Pt.2” then completes the frame without providing a clean return to ordinary daylight. The title may imply leadership, but the record has no obvious boss. Voice, riff, rhythm and feedback continually exchange control until the whole piece behaves like one badly wired organism.
The EP was created in only three months and began with no prepared blueprint. “Strap Me Down” and “MSSG” emerged through jamming, while “A-Bow” grew from its namesake recording. That history explains why Head Honcho feels discovered rather than manufactured, but the final result is not shapeless. The Janitors had learned how to recognize which accidents deserved repetition and when a jam had found its actual center. Their home-recording process allowed them to keep experimenting until the equipment behaved according to their own hearing. It also marked a return to the exploratory duo at the band’s core, with other musicians contributing as needed rather than determining a permanent conventional lineup.
Head Honcho and the preceding Worker Drone Queen EP were later joined on the double album Drone Head, which carried The Janitors beyond their Swedish circle and helped establish their reputation as “peddlers of heavy drones and fuzzed nightmares.” Heard alone, Head Honcho remains especially concentrated: twenty-eight minutes in which a tiny bow vibration becomes a massive psychedelic structure, vocals disappear into their own echoes and boogie is dragged through enough darkness to emerge almost shamanic. The Janitors do not clean the room. They switch off the lights, increase the volume and reveal that the dirt has been moving all along.
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