Judhead

When the music business started taking Limp Bizkit-frontman Freddie “Red Hat” Durst seriously, the result was a million dope ’n’ roll bands crawling out of the suburbs of America like cockroaches, all headed toward that great music-biz cracker cupboard. So, these days, it’s easy to dismiss any band with cranked-up, down-tuned Tony Iommi-style barre chords and Cookie Monster vocals as another snoozer. But Sacramento trio Judhead has refined the formula down to the sonic equivalent of paint fumes. How can you hate a tune that begins with singer-guitarist Judson Wheeler barking in an English-as-a-second-language snarl: “Bully of the neighborhood / Picked on anyone you could” while pummeling his fretboard (“Brother of Short”)? You can’t; that’s what. Way dumber than Ozzy, and that’s a good thing.