By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the busy year Tim “Shogun” Wall has had between Royal Headache’s archival live recordings LIVE IN AMERICA and his pair of side project EPs, Finnoguns Wake’s STAY YOUNG and Antenna’s ANTENNA!
Royal Headache – LIVE IN AMERICA
Antenna – S/T
Finnoguns Wake – STAY YOUNG
Genres: Noise Rock, Punk Rock, Glam Rock
Favorite Tracks: N/A
Arriving probably a decade too early to have blown up into a proper transpacific alt-rock phenomenon in the states, Australian punk rockers Royal Headache burned bright and fast before breaking up in 2017. Their self-titled debut and the excellently hooky HIGH, both critical favorites released across a three-year period, were all that was left behind before they called it quits. The albums were bottled lightning—a perfect collection of 22 fast-and-furious punk ditties, with all the scuzzy trademarks of their Down Under peers and all the explosive poppiness of the ones that commercially crossed over.
The embers are somehow still smoldering in 2024 in the form of a recently released live album, a two-part release featuring both a 2012 live session from legendary Jersey radio station WFMU and a 2015 set from Chicago’s Empty Bottle. Nearly as long as the band’s catalog, it is both archival proof of a shooting star and understanding of what has kept their myth alive; neither too revealing nor too withholding, hearing a 12-year-old radio dispatch of then-unreleased early standout “High” or a fuzzed-out fallaway take of “Little Star” becomes both engagingly distant and charmingly mysterious. LIVE IN AMERICA unfolds as evidence that Royal Headache was real, to you and to me, and yet it coming without warning and context seven years after their breakup only adds to the brilliant mystique.
And while the residual smoke from Royal Headache’s heyday had mostly cleared leading up to this recent live album, there could yet be flames again. Lead singer Tim “Shogun” Wall released a split single under the name Shogun and the Sheets back in 2018, both tracks building on Wall’s singular, theatrical vocals by adding a proper glam rock sheen, with big organ tones and twinkling piano parts—one an upbeat pop cut (“Hold On Kid”), the other a bluesy, dirt-kicking rocker (“Pissing Blood”). But outside of these two songs and some extensive gigging on the back of the Royal Headache afterglow, Shogun and the Sheets seems to have been short-lived, with no social content posted since April of 2022.
In addition to the release of LIVE IN AMERICA, Wall has spent the year returning in some form to his roots with two new projects, Antenna and Finnoguns Wake—though like all of the aforementioned music experienced from afar, nothing is that clear. Perhaps picking up where Shogun and the Sheets left off (literally and musically), or likely entirely new artistic ventures, where all of Wall’s work begins and ends is itself a hazy ponderment as exhilarating as the music itself.
The slightly older of the two projects (released in January) and a clumsy portmanteau of Wall’s and collaborator Finn Berzin’s names, Finnoguns Wake’s debut EP finds the two writing wiry and grounded mid-tempo rock numbers—Britpop emulators that intentionally never quite take off with the same dizzying radio blitz. Like Oasis songs that are more staticky and earnest, the two trade back and forth on the debut, STAY YOUNG. And while Wall’s vocal contributions pop more, it’s a fulfilling vision that certainly would’ve been enough after six years of musical silence.
But it’s Antenna for me that finds the emotional heart of what a third Royal Headache album could have been. Offering a mix of heart-on-the-sleeve power pop rhythms and melancholy garage rock fuzz, the project sees through the clearly memorable immediacy songs like “Another World” and “Wouldn’t You Know” years and years later. As the press release for the recent self-titled EP correctly asserts, “few have come close to capturing the balance between the disarmingly sincere soulfulness and irrepressible hardcore ferocity that makes (Wall) so unique.” The five tracks on display here certainly showcase that range; while it leans plenty on proper, straight-laced head bangers (“Cubes,” “Don’t Cry,” “English Three”), those songs are next to disarming cries from the void like “Lost” and “Antenna State,” the former a quietly devastating, upbeat call for help that immediately feels like one of the best songs Wall has ever written, the latter a groovy glam number that would’ve fittingly tied into what he was doing with Shogun and the Sheets.
As a fan of Royal Headache since the debut, it’s remarkable to have been gifted with so much adjacent music, archival or otherwise, in one year. Perhaps the writing of this piece is even premature—if you’re reading this Tim, there’s time for a fourth release in ‘24! You can check out Royal Headache’s LIVE IN AMERICA here, Finnoguns Wake’s STAY YOUNG here, and Antenna’s self-titled EP here!
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