dusted

The Minneapolis Uranium Club

I’m sure there are people who glide through November, then December, then New Year’s day without getting snagged by even a single impulse to summarize. Someone somewhere, who, faced with the rapid approach of 2025, has just shrugged without a second or third intrusive thought about what was and what it meant. Must be nice, I guess. But I can only guess, because I’m at least ten retrospectives in, music-related and otherwise. Let’s stick with the music-related. I’m sorry to report that I haven’t arrived at a grand, unifying theory of my 2024 listening experience. Still, more than in recent years, the albums that stuck with me were immersive, escapist or both. Can’t imagine why.

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Royal Headache had a close to decade-long run, but it was never easy. They went from dive bar shows to opening for the Black Keys within only a few years and flamed out finally in 2017, as substance abuse and interpersonal disputes took their toll. And yet, if you like your punk rock spiked with romantic tunefulness, if you harbor affection for the Buzzcocks, the Jam or, further back, the Small Faces, there just weren’t any other bands like Royal Headache. A lot of that was due to one Tim “Shogun” Wall, vocally a dead ringer for a young Rod Stewart, but scrawny, amped to the gills, grappling with the mic and stalking the stage floor, making an anthemic, super-charged racket.

Interviews suggest that Royal Headache’s rapid rise and fall left Shogun in a pretty nasty place, but now, half a decade later with Antenna, he’s back at it, making music again. We covered Finnogun’s Wake, his duo with Finn Berzin in the first Dust of 2024. Andrew Forell placed it, “somewhere between the concise attack of Shogun’s former band Royal Headache and the anthemic end of Britpop.” This five-song EP from Antenna runs faster and more punk than the last Royal Headache album, and it’s, thankfully, not as indebted to Blur/Oasis and their ilk. It’s better than Finnoguns Wake then, and as good or maybe even better than the two Royal Headache records.

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Too much ink has been spilled over the years about a supposed ECM sound; assuming for a microsecond that the detailed but reverberant jazz and classical offerings do constitute a sonic unity of some vague sort, Antenna blows the theory out of the water and parts it, like the Red Sea.   

I have not heard such a radical shift in compositional aesthetic since Tyshawn Sorey’s Oblique was dropped some five years ago. In retrospect, stretching the credibility of hindsight nearly to breaking point, hints of the diversity to come inform the percussion-heavy and metrically varied Mboko, the Cuban-born pianist’s ECM leader debut, but nothing there even orbits the cataclysmic beauty and knife-edge concentration of this 22-minute EP. 

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