Endless Boogie: Full House Head

Endless Boogie
Full House Head
No Quarter

If you’re into wild extended guitar jams, then Endless Boogie is definitely the band for you. Its bluesy, slacker take on rock music — equal parts Pavement and Lynyrd Skynyrd — is both expansive and, at its best, awfully infectious. Full Head House gives you 75 minutes of searing guitars and heavy rhythms that continue where the last effort, Focus Level, left off. The band can slam you in the face right off the bat, like it does with the lean riffs on “Empty Eye” or “Mighty Fine Pie”, or slowly build to bursting as on the dusty, appropriately titled “Slow Creep”. Then there is “A Life Worth Leaving”, which ends the album with a 22-minute onslaught of grinding guitars and crashing drums. As a band, few can tug on a riff and jam it out as long as Endless Boogie, though the deal breaker on this record, as it was on the last one, will still be the untethered howl of Paul Major’s voice. It’s pretty easy to deal with when it takes second seat to the guitars. However, when Major takes a more direct, frontman role, as on “Top Dollar Speaks His Mind”, he overplays his hand and that growling voice drowns out the blues-rock stomp. Endless Boogie really deserves credit for keeping the jam going on Full House Head so they should continue to keep those guitars off the leash. It might be time to reign in the vocals, though.

RATING 6 / 10