Album Reviews

Take Coheed and Cambria vocals (only far more harsh and severe), some of At the Drive-In’s experimental noise, and a bit of Rancid’s edgy speed and you’ll get an idea of what the Blood Brothers sound like.

The Blood Brothers’ music emerged, in part, as a product of the “No Wave” punk scene of the 1980s; and as a result, there has been some difficulty in precisely pinning their genre. Their earlier works from This Adultery is Ripe to Burn Piano Island, Burn, are comprised mostly of high-paced thrashcore punk, accompanied by screaming vocals that feel like steel-wool rubbing against your ear drums. However, they also exhibited a few scattered moments of semi-pleasant melodies, which they then decided to expand upon in their last release Crimes. Then on 2005’s Crimes, the Blood Brothers took 2/3 of what they do best (delivering powerful infernos of skull-puncturing noise) and combined it with 1/3 of their expanding experimental skills (soft yet creepy melodies, keyboard pieces, and other sound effects) making for a far more balanced assault on the ears. Their hit single off this album, “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck”, attests to this balance beautifully.

After all this shifting about, their increasing fan-base began to wonder what direction the band would take on their follow-up album. Would the gentler side of the band continue to grow and perhaps eclipse their hardcore roots? Would the band revert back to the their abrasive battle tactics and re-polarize their audience? Or would they continue in the same vein that yielded Crimes in hopes of honing their glistening new weapons? Only a thorough listen of Young Machetes can provide the answers we seek.

The album begins with the two vocalists jointly calling down fire from the sky. Their wish is granted as the track is set ablaze by lightning bolt lashes and hand grenades. The Blood Brothers have successfully gained the attention of their listeners. Within this song, “Set Fire to the Face on Fire”, there is life–bolting shards of life ricocheting off hell’s gates and into our ears. But there is also death in this song–an excruciating 11 second murder scene filled with numerous stabs to the heart. This mid-song meltdown is one of the unpleasant trends you will find driven into many songs on this album, and they each come complete with bleeding horror shrieks, nails-on-a-chalkboard guitar, flogging bass, and throbbing drums. To say they’re brutal is an understatement. It kind of feels like you’re drinking a refreshing frappucino, but about half-way through some random dude tells you he pissed in it. You’ll more fully understand what I’m saying if you listen to the following six tracks: “Set Fire to the Face on Fire”, “We Ride Skeletal Lightning”, “Laser Life”, “Vital Beach”, “1, 2, 3, 4 Guitars”, and “Nausea Shreds Yr Head”. Each contains a short rage-filled tantrum reminiscent of a two year old child but with the force of an atomic bomb. The fact that six of their fifteen tracks off this album are so painfully disrupted definitely puts a damper on their newly defiled listeners; but I suppose, for fans of their older work, these moments may very well be seen as specks of gold.

Another, less common trend found on this album is the band’s marvelous incorporation of piano pieces. By bringing this element into their music, the band provides its listeners with pleasant moments of relief that enable their audience to listen longer without being completely trampled by the harder, faster, and more ferocious moments on the album. It also gives the Blood Brothers an extra level of depth and diversity, which keeps the listener guessing as to what will next appear out of the band’s magic hat.

For example, the song “Camouflage, Camouflage” begins with splattering drum rolls and some heavy bass along with the vocalists swapping lines in a flurry as Johnny strikes a few keys on the piano, comprising what my grandfather would call “racket”. This then leads into guitar riffs ramping up and down the frets mixed with singing and screaming that eventually unfurl into a beautiful meadow where the keyboard is singled out and the two vocalists serenade us with tales of misfortune and woe. These tales then gradually build upon one another to form a captivating and climactic end. A few tracks later, you will find a similar touching moment occurring part-way through the song “Spit Shine Your Black Clouds”. After bopping and skipping through a few verses of dance-punk, the song flows splendidly into a poppy keyboard groove. This simplistic style carries on until the band gets tired of restraining its rage and decides to crank out the screams once again. In this way, the Blood Brothers make good use of a mixture of harsh and soothing sounds, which help keep the album from growing stale.



Unfortunately, the graceful prowess of the aforementioned tracks are virtually overrun by tracks laden with child-like chants of near-gibberish. This debilitating habit can be found in the songs, “Vital Beach”, “Rat Rider”, and “Huge Gold AK-47”. In each of these tunes, the vocalists revert back to elementary school techniques, attempting to out-shout their peers even if what they are shouting makes no coherent point. The result of such activity is a volley of distasteful, repetitive, and annoying nonsensical phrases. Now the chants may give the screamo kids something to sing along with during live performances; but other than that, they’re completely unnecessary and strip the songs of their potential success. That is, unless of course you’re one of the few people who enjoys screaming along and blurting out such unique phrases as “Vital beach! Vital beach! Vital beach! Vital beach, yeah! Vital beach, vital beach!”, “Rat Rider! Rat Rider! Yeah!”, “Rat rider, c’mon, rat rider!”, and “Huge! Gold! AK-47! Huge! (Huge!) Gold! (Gold!) AK-47!” If this sounds like your idea of a good time, you may want to consider the possibility that you are either mentally unstable or have Tourette’s.

Despite the ridiculous chants, however, the album does retain many great lyrical moments. The places that this band takes a person’s mind are both awful and inspiring. Their songs abound in symbols and metaphors cut into jagged shapes and pieced together with saliva. At times, they seem almost too creative for their own good.



On many songs, I felt like I was on a roller-coaster ride through a “Fuck Social Trends” circus where the media was drenched in mocking spotlights and consumer culture crowds were soaking up all the bloodshed as they eagerly inhaled toxic waste; and then, amid the pop culture jeers, sprung several incoherent tangents where the tracks beneath the carts would disappear in large sections, leaving the listener lost and bewildered. The songs begin heading one direction but often spastically sprinkle in stories from a scrapbook of disjointed thoughts. If there are parallels to be drawn, the Blood Brothers leave that task to the listeners.



But to their credit, they do exhibit many instances of pointed lyrical skill and effectiveness. Here are some examples: “I got shot in the face it's all on videotape. So c'mon, watch the blood, it's pouring commercial-free.” (We Ride Skeletal Lightning), “I couldn't see the love and affection. It was camouflaged as a jungle of erections.” (Camouflage, Camouflage), “Count weddings on our fingertips and wonder why our love's so cheap.” (You’re the Dream, Unicorn!), “You're working on a cruise now, serving caviar to the cruel. While they repossessed your heart; you're making payments on your face too.” (Spit Shine Your Black Clouds), “Hold on to love you learned to despise. Like an ocean choking on its own tide.” (Johnny Ripper), and “Toast another day of domination. Toast another day of demolition.” (Huge, Gold AK-47).



These little gems can be found throughout Young Machetes, but as mentioned, their lyrics often leave gaps in thought, making it difficult to trace their intentions from line to line. The song, “Lift the Veil, Kiss the Tank”, is the one exception. This song is the most musically, vocally, and lyrically solid composition of the album. The vigorous current of this track, fueled by the guitar’s mystical vibe and the vocalists’ passionate words, manage to propel the listener into an entirely new realm of vision. There the listener is held in a trance-like state for the song's entirety with no cacophonous breakdown to disrupt it. Instead, the band refines their aggression to a more coherent and far more profound tune manifesting itself towards the end of the track when the song erupts into a beautifully controlled explosion of sound, offering a perfect punch for the finishing lines, "Dress my corpse up in a low-cut dress. Drizzle lipstick on my charred french kiss. Dip my severed jaw in cheap cologne. Push-up bras dangling from snapped elbows. But death's just death no matter how you dress it up." Beautiful.

On the whole, Young Machetes, delivers a well-orchestrated assault on pop culture, mocking its artificial attempts to solve life’s complex equations. The addition of their abrasive sound deeply ingrains their splintered thoughts into the listeners’ ears. This sometimes happens a bit too harshly and incoherently, but they’ve taken another step forward on this album in learning to be more gentle and effective with the invasive weapons they wield, and for this I applaud them.