The Heart Goes To Heaven The Head Goes To Hell

 (8 customer reviews)

How do you follow A City Dressed In Dynamite, an album hailed by fans and critics as one of the best in recent memory? Where do you go after you've explored the depths of society with songs like Viva Discordia and Reagan's Kids? For Godforbid, the next step was into his own depths.

The Heart Goes to Heaven, The Head Goes to Hell is a much more personal account of the urban dystopia described in the previous album. Each song paints a scene and a perspective onto an emotion; themes of regret, apathy, hope, hopelessness, dismay, shame and acceptance are all represented through a voice that, by the end, feels genuinely sorry for the things it has seen. Especially at the back of the album, the tones blend so seamlessly that it almost feels like a medley.

Even from the opening chords of Adapt, you'll notice that the...Read more

That Handsome Devil is a band that has changed a lot in the past handful of years; but at the same time, they haven't changed so much at all. Each EP and LP is a variation on the same thematic content and same That-Handsome-Devil-sound, but they're not the same records.

Their self-titled EP was an affair that came with equal parts humor and gloom, sometimes - hell, oftentimes - in the same lyric. It was driving and varied, lyrically referential and always original. It's an excellent EP, and throughout its Public-Service-Announcement-gone-terribly-terribly-wrong duration, you can pick out heavy swaths of the sound that would come to dominate their first full-length LP, "A City Dressed In Dynamite."

"A City Dressed In Dynamite" plays like an amazing collection of eleven (arguably twelve) stomping, booming funeral dirges written for Hunter S. Thompson and John Dillinger. Godforbid's sense of humor's still there, but it's a bit (a lot) closer to schadenfreude this...Read more

Several years ago, I was taken to a That Handsome Devil show in Boston and discovered a band to root for. They made a good first impression: everyone had on a white jumpsuit except frontman Godforbid, who sashayed drunkenly around in a floor length fur coat, tossing off endearing insults towards the audience between songs. Well here's something original, I thought, but can they hold it together, especially in a business that not only resists originality, but often seems to try extra hard to stomp it out? Well, they've not only held it together, they have thrived and grown, as evidenced by "The Heart Goes To Heaven, The Head Goes To Hell." Humor works best when it belies the deadly seriousness of its purpose and, make no mistake, these guys are serious. The themes are real, the lyrics cut deep and the music effortlessly draws from a wide variety of styles to create a mood just right for the story. And That Handsome Devil is a band of storytellers - "Charlie's Inferno" tells the sad...Read more