the brothers blood
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Have you ever had the experience of hearing a band for the first time and immediately thinking, “This is it— this is the music I hear in my head. Someone finally cracked the code”?
I thought that I had that experience a few times as a developing fan of abrasive, screamy music— the first time I heard “I Shot the Devil” by Suicidal Tendencies being one of those that really sticks out in my head— but when I first heard The Blood Brothers, it was like someone finally connected two disparate wires in my brain and the circuit was complete. The Blood Brothers didn’t emerge from a vacuum, and they were certainly several degrees more popular than every other band that sounded like them, which means that they’ve also been pretty influential in the intervening years since they broke up in 2007. But I truly don’t think there’s ever been another band that actually sounds like them.
I guess, in order to make that argument, you’d have to actually describe what The Blood Brothers sounded like, which is harder than it seems on the surface. Breaking the band down into its component parts— the disco-break-from-hell drum work of Mark Gajadhar, the amorphously throbbing bass lines from Morgan Henderson, the brilliantly imaginative guitar soundscapes of Cody Votolato— only gets you so far. The Blood Brothers were more collaborative than that; they were as much about the conversation between the individual musical ideas at play as they were about the study of contrasts.
It’s most apparent in the vocals: Jordan Blilie’s quivering-yet-forceful baritone lisp and straightforwardly caustic screams play such a natural counterpoint to Johnny Whitney’s deceptively abrasive, secretly tuneful toxic-waste shriek, but at the same time, the dynamic deliberately disorients. You’d be forgiven for being overwhelmed by it at first. One of the band’s most enduring trademarks is the playful and creatively complex layering of Blilie’s and Whitney’s voices— lacing oppressive screams, eerie melodies, and percussive vocal patterns on top of each other in an intricate latticework that forces the listener to be more attentive, picking out the often-uncomfortable, surreal cut-and-paste poetry of the lyrics and attempting to make sense of them.
Of course, that all melts back into the soup of The Blood Brothers, which, as a whole, is some of the most unique hardcore-derived music ever committed to tape. The Blood Brothers started with a baseline approach of your standard screamy, chaotic hardcore, and kept layering stuff and stuff and stuff on top of it.
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They made writhing, squirming music that accurately reflects the mess of my subconscious. Knowingly or not, they made music that was affirming, provocative, and transgressive in an extremely queer way— if I were a different kind of writer, I could probably pen a paper on how they participated in the “queering of hardcore”— and in the process left behind a legacy of some of the weirdest and catchiest music I’ve ever heard. The Blood Brothers are so much more than just the blueprint for sass. They’re one of the best and most consistent bands to ever come out of the hardcore scene, and one of my favorite bands of all time. Let’s take a look at their discography step by step.
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