Severed Heads have had one of the more tangled discographies imaginable, with alternate editions of albums, re-recordings, and an increasing number of CD-R and Internet-only releases in recent years. Distilling a cohesive and comprehensive overview out of it all is no easy task, but with the two-disc
ComMerz, compiled and remastered by
Tom Ellard himself for release on the
LTM label,
Severed Heads come as close to a good introduction for newcomers as can be created, covering near a quarter century's worth of music. For listeners overseas who mostly knew the group through their mid- to late-'80s work licensed via
Nettwerk and haven't kept up with
Ellard in the years since,
ComMerz provides a perfect balance -- the first disc ranges from
"Adolf a Karrot" from
Blubberknife to selections from
Bad Mood Guy, while the second starts with
Rotund for Success'
"Greater Reward" and continues straight up through
Under Gail Succubus'
"Snuck" from 2006. The fact that
ComMerz excludes the very earliest
Severed Heads era shows just how hard it is to get a truly all-encompassing overview together -- and as aficionados of the group know thanks to 1996's
Severything, it's not as if
Ellard hasn't taken it into account before. So this functions more as an "accessible" overview of the group, depending on how the term is defined --
"Goodbye Tonsils" and the monumental
"Hot with Fleas," for instance, may have never made the contemporary Top 40 but are still addictively catchy. Above all else,
ComMerz is a showcase of constantly evolving
electronic music, finding approaches that would become cliches in the hands of lesser musicians, exploring new sounds and beats in bloody-minded defiance of whatever a particular trend might be.
Bernie Maier's liner notes, themselves reduced from a longer biographical overview available online, provide excellent context for the band's history and grapplings with the music industry as a whole. ~ Ned Raggett
