posted 08/07/2005 (Sun) @ 02:57 pm
>>> Music Reviews
The Blood Brothers - Burn, Piano Island, Burn! (2003)
Punk / Art-Rock / Noise
Play it one more time, Sam
- Guitarmy
- Fucking’s Greatest Hits
- Burn, Piano Island, Burn
- Every Breath Is A Bomb
- Ambulance vs. Ambulance
- USA Nails
- Cecilia and the Silhouette Saloon
- Six Nightmares At The Pinball Masquerade
- The Salesman, Denver Max
- I Know Where The Canaries Go
- God Bless You, Blood Thirsty Zeppelins
- The Shame
This review would start by explaining how “brutal” this album is, except that a) the word “brutal” is so often thrown around discussing dainty-by-comparison bands like Metallica or System of a Down that it has lost its persuasiveness; and b) “brutal” can’t quite convey the feel of “Burn, Piano Island, Burn” as a whole. I need more adjectives. The second that comes to mind is “crazy.”
Like a pair of angry, toddler-aged Syd Barretts, Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney’s disgruntled mental patient vocalizations don’t just ring out over the din, they do most of the work to create it. Be prepared for this. The opener, “F*cking’s Greatest Hits,” manages to be hyperfast, screaming, hardcore punk, while, at the same time, getting funky! This bipolarity sets the stage for the rest of the album and its rabid delivery of what often sounds like the noise inside a madman’s head, whether it be a hurricane of howling, gonzo guitars and voices, a more melodic flash flood of near-pop, or moments of ominous, piano-tinged clarity.
The Blood Brothers’ three gears get shifted constantly, usually grinding against each other all within the course of a single song. Extreme variety like this might sound like a good thing, but to some it might also sound like a series of bloody car crashes. “Piano Island” is an album that mandates endurance on the part of the listener, since wading through some of the Brothers’ tunes can become tedious after the novelty wears off, despite the high tempo and frenzied delivery. Unfortunately, that doesn’t take very long. The band can only explode into a frenzy of noise in the middle of a good passage so many times before it starts to piss you off-although, maybe that’s all part of the show.
More than anything else, the lyrics on “Piano Island” are what should ultimately win you over listening to it. I’m not one to go around praising lyrical mastery, as my psyche has become so dulled to “stay away from me, I’m dangerous, let’s have sex”-type “musings” as to not even care what the band are going on about. The Blood Brothers’ lyrics are pure, unadulterated postmodern POETRY which will undoubtedly seem “drug-addled” and “random” to others used to having “My girlfriend broke up with me!” near literally screamed at them.
There is some tasty punk riffage floating around in the soup of shit-loud insanity that is “Burn, Piano Island, Burn!,” but if you’re like me, there’s only so much of Blilie’s aimless throat-rending that you can take before you feel like YOUR island is going to burn. I mean, these guys make Cedric Bixler sound like a “nice young man” by comparison.
The Brothers at least retain the sensibility and decency not to cookie-cut screaming into an otherwise straight rock album like any number of vaguely angry larynx-shredders like Thursday, but what they DO end up producing is something on the edge of the realm of conventional explanation. Imagine reading a good book that’s been conveniently “sectioned” by a Ritalin-deprived brat with a Sharpie and a pair of scissors, and you get an idea of how this album plays. Imagine what it would be like to have a volume knob and a 1/4″ jack into your vocal cords at the age of seven, and you’ll get an idea of how this album sounds at its loudest. Frightening? Maybe. But Bob Dylan went electric and, appropriately, shocked everyone; Dick Dale and burgeoning hard rock in general forced Fender to streamline their newfangled amplifiers to accommodate the crazies that tried to purposely overdrive the speakers. Now we’re going for the throat, literally. Imagine how hard rock could sound in twenty years. Hardcore, dude!
Tags: art rock, blood brothers, burn piano island burn, hardcore, metal, noise, noise rock, punk, the blood brothers
