THE BLOOD BROTHERS: YOUNG MACHETES (2006)
1) Set Fire To The Face On
Fire; 2) We Ride Skeletal Lightning; 3) Laser Life; 4) Camouflage, Camouflage;
5) You're The Dream Unicorn!; 6) Vital Beach; 7) Spit Shine Your Black Clouds;
8) 1, 2, 3, 4 Guitars; 9) Lift The Veil, Kiss The Tank; 10) Nausea Shreds Yr
Head; 11) Rat Rider; 12) Johnny Ripper; 13) Huge Gold AK-47; 14) Street
Wars/Exotic Foxholes; 15) Giant Swan.
The Blood Brothers' fifth and last album
arguably continues their drift towards «accessibility», although for me, that
ain't saying much — as usual, I do not «get» these vocals, and think that
whatever good or great musical ideas these guys might have, they consistently
sabotage them by stubbornly continuing to sing as if hung overnight by their
genitals from a palm tree. From that point of view, they give a fairly realistic
performance, but it also makes it quite hard to think of their songs as
anything other than an exaggerated, ridiculous farce.
Which is too bad, since many of the songs do contain interesting ideas. Young Machetes was announced as a
return to the band's «screamo» roots, but in reality it tries to achieve a
working compromise between the non-stop fury of their first pair of albums and
the experimental developments of the second one — a fairly diverse collection
that continues to express the band's disappointment with the world and its
honest desire to blow it up from the inside in every single way they had tried
previously, and a few ones they hadn't, such as the funky keyboard rhythms of
ʽLaser Lifeʼ or the moody, almost haunting composition ʽExotic Foxholesʼ, with
droning folksy acoustic guitars, bassoons (?) and, most wondrous of all, no vocals, an idea The Blood Brothers
should have stuck to with much more enthusiasm, I believe.
There are also inklings of catchiness in some
of the riffs (ʽCamouflage, Camouflageʼ) and some of the «vocal» melodies (ʽRat
Riderʼ, like a crazy man's take on a nursery rhyme). There is also ongoing
social protest (ʽLift The Veil, Kiss The Tankʼ), with even denser strung pearls
of metaphors and allegories ("young machetes in lingerie charm us all
into a frenzy") that still resolve in truisms ("death's just death no
matter how you dress it up"), but if people need truisms to stop wars,
well, the brothers might have a point there. And, as usual, there is a fair
amount of advanced technicalities for all those who think that catchiness is
ever so overrated.
Problem is, none of that matters from a general
point of view. Young Machetes may
have, for the first and last time, brought The Blood Brothers into the top 100
(probably due to good promotion from V2 and the band's continuing
capitalization on the anti-war theme), but I just do not see it working as the
kind of statement that they wanted to make. Some things are just not compatible
— you may play in 13/8 time to your musically knowledgeable friends, or you may
shout wake up! to the sleepy world,
but if you try to do both simultaneously, your friends might think that you're
an offensive idiot, and the sleepy world might want to lock you up.
A good case in point is the epic finale to the
album — ʽGiant Swanʼ, an overall good idea marred by uninspiring execution. The
lyrics, of an almost totemist nature, conclude the Brothers' vision on a
particularly original note — where their ancestors saw the world as a Giant
Tree or a Giant Serpent, they have
this hallucinatory vision of "ghosts in his wings, his guts are stuffed
with polaroids, and they're all humiliating" and how "he wrote a
play and you're the protagonist". The musical buildup goes from solemn
dirge to overwhelming noisefest and back, as the Giant Swan completes and
restarts its grim cycle of existence. All of this could be fascinating — I find
it as ultimately boring as it is respectable, and with the usual mix of vocal
ugliness to decisively tilt the scale against these guys.
I do, however, give them full praise for
deciding to make this their last record and break up, because Young Machetes makes it very clear
that, whatever they had to say, whichever points they wanted to stress, they
said, stressed, and finalized it all, and their «intellectual-extremist» shtick
had largely failed, although it had its brief moments of curiosity — but no, I
could never regard them as any sort of ideological analogy for the Stooges courtesy
of the 2000s.
"full praise for deciding to make this their last record and break up"
ReplyDeleteAh, more bands should follow that example. If I may do a suggestion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alestorm
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5007300/Alestorm___Battleheart_Discography_(MOST_COMPREHENSIVE_)_ERICPLA
The two Battleheart EP's don't cut it yet, but the album Captain Morgan's Revenge is great fun with fine riffs and catchy melodies done at blazing speed. Afterwards: downhill. For instance the cover of In the Navy is only funny when you know the original and even then not that funny.