Bloomington, Indiana's
Apache Dropout rose a lot slower than some of their peers in the age of the ravenous music blog. Instead of appearing with a track or two online and immediately being thrust into momentary superstardom overnight, the group grew more organically, initially releasing demo-quality cassettes and slowly growing with each proper release. Following their brilliant debut and a somewhat more refined follow-up,
Bubblegum Graveyard,
Magnetic Heads is a re-release of the group's early cassette recordings on the
Magnetic South label. The ten songs here come from 2008's Cha Cha Cha and 2009's Lysergic Caveman Choogle: Not for Pigs, and show the band's early phases occurred at far looser, more oddball times than the garage stomping that would follow. The first thing that pops out is the heap of reverb that coats every surface of most of these songs, accountable to the fact that some of these recordings were made in a disused grain silo near the band's home. Even more curiously than that is the acoustic lean of a lot of the tracks here. From the
Fugs-y hollering of "Eyes Wide Open" to the hillbilly fiddle workouts of "Taj Mahal" and "Mary Don't You Weep," the
Apache Dropout heard on
Magnetic Heads is pretty far removed from the backwards-looking garage outfit on later releases. Even their completely fuzz-fried cover of
Chuck Berry's "Memphis Tennessee" feels more backwoods than usual, despite some of the most scuzzy guitar tones imaginable. Never an especially slick band,
Magnetic Heads makes
Apache Dropout's proper releases sound pristine by comparison. It's an interesting archival release, one that offers fans of the band a puzzling look into their extremely different beginnings. The sound is so different it might be best left to those already enamored with
Apache Dropout to try to understand, rather than an introductory point for those new to the band. While the obscuro-pop, country-punk jams here have their own merit, compared to the gritty garage weirdness that followed, the band on
Magnetic Heads sounds like a completely different entity. ~ Fred Thomas