Band:	Demon Head
Album:	Through Holes Shine The Stars
Style:	Hard rock
Release date:	September 20, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. The Chalice
02. Draw Down The Sky
03. Our Winged Mother
04. Every Flatworm
05. Wildfire
06. Deeper Blades
07. Frost
08. This Vessel Is Willing

What happens when occult rock goes all in on the gothic touches?

It's true that there was no such thing as what we now call "gothic rock" in the 60s. But a decade before Bela Lugosi's Dead and Join Hands, rock music already laid the seeds for the fascination with the otherworldly and the macabre. Coven's 1969 Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls continues to be an underrated classic, known perhaps more for having a song that has the same name as metal's main progenitors, but it was a blueprint for merging the 60s psychedelia with that gothic touch, the occult imagery, the B-horror aesthetics, all the things that would eventually find their way into more contemporary acts like Electric Wizard, The Devil's Blood, Ghost, Lucifer, or In Solitude. But, dark and macabre as all these bands are, you don't often see them described as "gothic".

Demon Head's first couple of records continued that trend, being retro-appealing heavy psych, the proto-doom kind, but whose tone felt colder and whose more baritone Danzig-esque vocals felt more in line with what's coded as gothic in music. Still, retro psych first and foremost. It wasn't until 2019's Hellfire Ocean Void that the guitars also starting borrowing more from post-punk that the music started to align more with the gothic rock genre, something that felt very natural due to the dark elements already present in their music. 2021's Viscera though was where the scales were tipped more towards gothic rock, finally embracing the sound more fully.

Now that Through Holes Shine The Stars serves as the second album since the tipping of the scales, it's pretty clear to see that the scales were tipped quite heavily. Though it's still recognizably the same band, the vocals coming from the same singer and all that, there's a newfound sense of theatricality that makes the vocal performance sound overly dramatic. While Viscera was slow and moody, Through Holes Shine The Stars is all that but it goes even deeper on the sense of theatricality, which is both its charm and its biggest point of contention, with more effects and more vocal layering to really drive it home. Either you're along for the ride or it's too obnoxious for you.

There are moments where it feels like too much for me as well, and I do appreciate the moments where there is some restraint shown. There are quite a few bits where the doomier side of Demon Head rears its head, under the permeating vocal layers (it does feel like there's a backing vocal layer accompanying the main one a lot of the time). Aside from the vocal performance, Through Holes Shine The Stars does a pretty good job of alternating more driving mid-paced upbeat sections with moodier slower sections, post-punk melodies with more arena-friendly hard rock, though it doesn't feel like there are enough sections that really wow me in either direction, and I find myself thinking that the band had a better penchant for this blend of styles when the scales were tipped in the other direction.