Culture
Review: Big Fat Head’s ‘Global Voyeur’
By: Emily Votaw
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (WOUB) – Big Fat Head‘s latest, Global Voyeur, careens into view with opening track “Kicking My Own Ass,” a song that throbs and broods at exactly the right propulsive frequency to earn its fabulous title.
It’s moody, a touch satirical, but could you really trust anyone who didn’t know what you meant when you said you were kicking your own ass?
It’s a superb launching point for what follows: 12 high-grade, ultra-concentrated rippers as visceral as they are thoughtful, a potent transmutation of the particular aches and ills of the modern age mighty enough to disrupt and transcend it.
Overwhelming unease about the apocalyptic state of things hasn’t sounded so commanding since DEVO’s landmark debut!
By track two, “Yesyesyes,” we are knee-deep in arrangements that snarl, expand, collapse, and lurch forward tooth and fang. The hook is immediate, and nothing gets wasted, least of all time.
“Massacre” leans harder into paisley psychedelia, wrapping a genuine pop melody in distorted vocals around a groovy riff too tough to become precious. “Concrete” pushes the vocals to the front of another remarkably tight arrangement. “Forget It” pivots toward minimalist art rock, propelled by controlled, hypnotic, jagged guitar rhythms before expanding into sprawling, cerebral radiation.
“Paradox” proves brilliantly driving and melodic, surreal and cryptic one moment before becoming unashamedly intimate the next. It begins in familiar alt-rock territory, its guitar sauntering instead of charging, before dropping into one of the album’s most explosive passages. The shift works as a hinge for the entire record. After the density and nervous ricochet of the first half, Global Voyeur begins revealing just how expansive it can become.
“Olivia’s Song” opens side two with lean, muscular rock before “Never Seen My Homeland” softens the palette with warm acoustic textures, making the visceral “Revolution Song” arrive even harder. “Questions” finds the band in the midst of a brutal bout of nodus tollens, describing modern angst with admirable lyrical restraint.
“Going Away” opens into an invigorating arrangement of saxophone and, yes, sitar. The stylistic range is considerable, yet the band’s identity never wavers. Then “2020” strips everything back to voice and acoustic guitar, becoming an exemplary folk song—raw, unguarded and unafraid to get sonorous about the mundane and the ultra-mundane with equal ease.
Big Fat Head uses what might seem like a limited palette to create an emotionally dynamic and effortlessly engrossing record. The songs are driving, gritty and explosive, yet controlled and polished in exactly the right places. It is fierce garage rock delivered with the kind of steely compulsion its forebears would recognize immediately.
The band recorded Global Voyeur in the fall of 2024 at the Lodge, a onetime Masonic Temple across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in Dayton, Kentucky. The sessions came at the end of an international run that had reached Canada, at a moment when the group’s future was somewhat uncertain. Determined to capture the energy and sound of what they had been playing live, the album was recorded quickly, and the result feels immediate without coming across as rushed, adventurous without becoming indulgent.
The only thing better than garage rock is psychedelic garage rock, and the only thing better than psychedelic garage rock is psychedelic garage rock that wasn’t made in a garage at all. Global Voyeur never loses sight of the immediacy that makes garage rock compelling, but it stretches that language in every direction without sacrificing momentum.
Big Fat Head has always stood out among Columbus bands. With Global Voyeur, they sound less like a rising regional act than a band with a fully realized artistic identity, and a truly exceptional one, at that.