Review: Dark Entries picks up Severed Heads yet again for Ear Bitten, a double LP reissue of some of the band's earliest material. Pegged as early pushers of the Australian underground industrial scene, Severed Heads emerged in the wake of a former project also shared between three members, Tom Ellard, Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright: Mr. And Mrs. No Smoking Sign. The edgier name Severed Heads was also, conveniently, snappier, and the sonic result of this resignal act would soon prove it a good decision. Though they say they aimed simply to take after forebears like Throbbing Gristle or Suicide, Ear Bitten proves much more than the simple fact of stylogeny. The 22-track record was born of an anarchic assemblage of found domestic and street-larked objects (as well as specialist musical instruments) blurring the lines between the two: using every sound-making tool from cassette deck, to rare Korg or Kawai synth, to proverbial pots and pans, to open-reel (and thus implicatively fuckable-with) dictaphones, Ear Bitten offers a diabolical vision of the sheer, wordless length of the post-punk deserts parched by their 70s, New York precursors.
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