“Everyone knows you can’t have creative pursuits when you turn thirty,” a Bushwick barista said in the backroom of Windjammer on a recent Friday night. She laughed at this, and this was part of an extended bit that I was trying to follow, something above my comedic paygrade, all handled by Beautiful, No?, a local sketch comedy troupe that was definitively not breaking up, but it was hard not to feel the subordinate shadow of some truth hanging over what might be, or might have been, the final show ever for Big Head, a quartet1 led by Haley Gorycki that’s been together since 2022 and has played about two dozen shows in and around around the neighborhood, the second or third billed in basements, Hart Bar or Purgatory’s backroom. Not every band gets an obituary and it was only the case that two of its members were departing to form a different, perhaps rival band (Damian Taxidermi, which plans to “debut live” later this year at an arts space somewhere else in Bushwick) but the moment nevertheless deserves remembrance. Surely something was over. You could feel it in the air, the sense of departure, of an immediately coming vacancy. Maybe it was the year––the last one, which ended last month––or maybe it was something else, a different moment, one that carried us on nobly, though the sometimes mask-conscious and foggily hopeful Post-Pandemic Era, the warm certainly of a collective movement, maybe that was over too and maybe it had never been or maybe it was just a mist that was lifted, replaced with something else, a brisk cold. At any rate, I think that must have been the theme or something like that in “Helicopter,” the song the group was also putting out, while departing for however long, to maybe represent everything I think I liked about music from bands like these; a clattering, subdued moodiness, a fog of anxiety wrapped in thick guitars that sound like yells distantly heard from Purgatory’s back room or somewhere else. We’re always there, or just outside. It’s almost as good as “Whopper Wednesday,” which I’d also recommend, and which they closed out their perhaps final set with, perhaps the only song of deep yearning written about the Burger King on Knickerbocker Avenue.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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