Big Blood

Big Blood are Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin, a married couple in Portland, Maine, who since 2007 have been recording prolifically at home with no attempt to make money. They sound so much better to me than to anyone I know that I wonder if other people are even hearing the same thing, or if there are multiple auditory universes. If I can touch the Eternal Nameless by listening to certain music, am I insane or just lucky?

They each write and sing lead on their own songs, but Colleen usually sings backup for Caleb, and her voice is the heart of their sound. It has been described to me as "discordant screeching", "the worst singer in the world", and "is there something wrong with the recording or is she doing that on purpose?" During rehearsals for Stravinski's The Rite of Spring, musicians kept thinking there were mistakes in the score. What Colleen is doing on purpose is using timbre and vibrato so creatively that it doesn't sound like a human voice could even go there. She can spend an entire song playing with a level of laser-focused shrillness that other singers can barely touch.

Even if she were an ordinary singer, they would still be my favorite musical stylists for their rhythms that hammer the one beat, their fuzz-folk instrumentation, their in-your-face dissonance, their spacy background aura, and how it all comes together in raw yet elegant multilayer soundscapes. That's the other heart of their sound, and it's all Caleb. In this podcast interview Colleen reveals that Caleb sees colors in sounds, and he does all the recording and mixing like he's painting.

I wonder if she actually is an ordinary singer and Caleb is making her sound that good with some kind of electronic filtering that no one else can do. Even then, Colleen would still be my favorite songwriter. In the interview she shows deep understanding of the creative process: how holding a channel open is like walking a tightrope, how something good becomes stale with repetition, how lyrics can hurt creativity because "a word pins you down". I wasn't surprised to learn that a lot of her lyrics are made up at the last moment. Sometimes they aren't even words, and sometimes they're cryptic and metaphysical, like "Remember the chills before being" or "Does a man seek his own face for the flaws in shadows beneath?"

Most of their music is available on this Free Music Archive page, but some of their best stuff is not, and they have a few good songs on side projects under other names. Here's their discography on Discogs, their record company blog, their bandcamp page, and a Facebook fan page.

When I first started going through their songs I only liked about one in ten -- but I liked those so much that I kept going through the duds looking for more gems, and finding them. To give you more options for where to start, here are some three song samplers:

Light Colleen: Go See Boats, She Sells Sanctuary, Oh Country.
Heavy Colleen: Creepin Crazy Time, Dead Song, Away Pt III.
Weird Colleen: Destin Rain, Everything Is Improving, Lectric Lashes 2.
Extreme Colleen: Glory Daze, Song For Baltimore, I Will Love You.
Rock Caleb: It's Alright, Old Time Primitives, Sovereignty You Bitch.
Folk Caleb: Hangman, Sick With Information, The Rise of Quinnisa Rose.
Weird Caleb: South Of Portland, Sirens Knell, Don't Trust The Ruin.

And here it is album by album. Disclaimer: this is a work in progress. I only discovered them in August of 2014, and every time I spend an evening listening I notice enough new things that I have to do a partial rewrite of this page. This process has not slowed down, which means what I don't know is still bigger than what I know. And if their music is so deep, how much deeper is reality itself? I'll never know because reality is not as interesting. But if anyone wants to discuss the music, you can email me at ranprieur at gmail.

Asian Mae - Collsing (1999 - 2004)

Officially Big Blood are not a duo but a "phantom four piece of Asian Mae, Caleb Mulkerin, Rose Philistine and Colleen Kinsella." I'm guessing that when they record, they feel more creative taking on imaginary alternate identities. Anyway, this album is a collection of Colleen's recordings before Big Blood. The only thing I really like is a pretty song called Window In Time. They were also in a band called Cerberus Shoal, whose music mostly bores me. Caleb mentioned in an interview that his previous band was unsatisfying because there were so many members that politics got in the way of creativity.

Strange Maine 11.04.06

Their first three albums are named with live venues and dates, so I assumed they were live albums, but I read somewhere that they would play a live show and then record the set list at home. This explains how Colleen's exceptional opening song, All Operations, can have two vocal tracks balanced between the left and right channels. Her second song, A Quiet Lousy Roar, explodes into more voices than I can count, and it took me a long time to appreciate it. Her third song, Past Time, is the only one without vocal overdubs and my big favorite. It's like an extended solo by a dreamy lounge singer in an alternate 1930's, with almost no repetition, and words that slip into incoherence among soul-splitting notes. "Guide us astray of golden threads so loose that binding me are they still." Colleen's final song, Slumber Me, rewards patient listening, with slow harmonium (accordion?) and flute notes that are hard to distinguish from her voice. I don't want to say too much about lyrics when I could be imagining meaning in nonsense, but at least three of these four are love songs.

Caleb has three songs. A Friendly Noose will be done better as the Fire On Fire song Hangman, but this version is worth a listen for Colleen's unearthly backing vocals. She does the same kind of thing on Full Of Smoke, and I wonder if that's why both mp3's carry the Pillars of Creation space photo. (I've used Mp3tag to attach the improved Pillars of Creation image on the right to my entire Big Blood library.) Also on Full Of Smoke and on Caleb's catchy third song, Under The Concourse, Colleen sings along with him, and given the refinement of her own songs, it's surprising how much she can sound like a hillbilly.

Strange Maine 1.20.07

Sovereignty You Bitch has some of Colleen's best sing-along vocals, and it's a great piece of noise rock. If you like Caleb's voice, The Fall of Quinnisa Rose is the song where it's the most raw and beautiful.

My favorite Colleen song on this album is a cover of the Sumatran pop song Indang Pariaman. At first I dismissed it as some kind of awful Hindu temple chant, but on my third or fourth listen I suddenly got it and now it's one of the most trippy things I've heard. It's also her first completely happy song. Suffer Creation is a good experiment in eerie multilayer vocals. There's also a cover of composer Erik Satie, and Handsome Son of No One is Colleen's classiest song, like something you'd hear at an elite music school in the distant past or future. I like to imagine that this ethereal avant-garde chamber music is Colleen's native style, while Caleb's native style is the backwoods garage noise of Sovereignty You Bitch, and their greatness as a band comes from their ability to integrate these two forces, the sky and the earth.

Space Gallery Jan. 27, 2007 Sahara Club Jan. 28, 2007

The opener, Glory Daze, is like a demonic circus song where Colleen lets it rip in a way she has not done before. A Hole In One marks the first time her vocals have been so low and foreboding, and the harmonium sounds like a mournful church organ. Shrining Light is a fluttery folk song that I would not have guessed as this album's biggest hit on YouTube. And Sequins is one of their weirdest songs, a cover of an even more obscure song by Alex Lukashevsky.

From Caleb, Don't Trust The Ruin is an epic noise dirge that gave its name to their record company. It's like he was competing with Sequins to see who could sound more like Tom Waits, and the result is like the soundtrack to a postapocalyptic journey through a haunted wasteland. I can't make out the whole chorus but I like to think the line is "Ever its silence is sound."

She Said Nothing is a brilliant folk song with impressive string plucking, and I think I hear Colleen's influence in Caleb's heady lyrics and punctuated singing style. And The Rise of Quinnisa Rose is almost my favorite song by anyone. Even without Colleen's contribution it's great songwriting, and her vocal soloing blasts through the sky to a place that no other music has touched except Song For Baltimore. Quinnisa Rose is their daughter, who sort of created the band by forcing them to stay at home instead of touring. She was born in 2007 and would start contributing to their albums immediately if you count crying, in 2010 as a speaker, and in 2015 as a singer-songwriter.

Sew Your Wild Days Tour Vol. 1 (2007)

This is the album where Colleen goes off the rails. Adversaries & Enemies is the first time she sings to strummed chords more than finger-picked notes, and the first time she holds that edge in her voice for an entire song. It's like an explosion of happiness that will ignite the supernova of happiness at the end of the album. Vitamin C is a sharp, punchy cover of the krautrock classic. And Don't Trust The Ruin II sounds like Joanna Newsom's ghost covering "Bela Lugosi's Dead", but I wonder about the title because it's more like A Quiet Lousy Roar than Don't Trust The Ruin.

Sometimes a mediocre band will strike a vein of such creative power that they suddenly record a song on a level far above their other stuff. But what if this happens to the best band in the world? Song For Baltimore is my religion. Sometimes in a dream I'll hear music that's better than any real music could possibly be, but Song For Baltimore is that good -- I'm afraid if I hear it too many times I'll wake up. Colleen's voice holds a wild beauty that I've only ever heard in intentionally bad music and the howls of coyotes. It's like a bolt of lightning that doesn't stop, and it rises to impossible heights and then higher as the low end fills with electric guitar and monk-like chanting. This is what Christmas songs are trying to be. Song For Baltimore is the key that opens my brain to the light behind the world. I make hard decisions by asking what would Song For Baltimore do. I think the song is about the humble glory of a well-lived life and its metaphysical context (the bright is all the more beautiful, the spirit risen in sequence) but it might also be about the ecstacy of ego loss in intense social experiences (some things wash away, so you're one thing). Maybe she wrote it after seeing a show in Baltimore, or my crazy theory is that Baltimore is a joke name for death.

Sew Your Wild Days Tour Vol. II (2007)

This has the most Free Music Archive downloads of their early albums, but I just can't get into it. 'Preese 'Preese has interesting trilly vocals, She Said Nothing II is a nice instrumental, Caleb's Got Wings? sounds exactly like Tom Waits, and the only thing I really like is Haystack, the ultimate realization of Colleen's birdlike multitrack vocals.

Fire On Fire: Self-titled and The Orchard (2007-2008)

Fire On Fire is a side project with both members of Big Blood and some friends who lived in the same house. I'm lumping their two albums together, and I'm not sure where they fit chronologically with the other 2007-2008 albums. Caleb's great song is Hangman. The verses alternate with an incredible blend of Colleen's voice and a luminous string tremolo, joined by high fuzz guitar like happy insects.

Colleen sings lead on a catchy song that might be about reincarnation, Amnesia, and a bluegrassy song with great lyrics, Assanine Race. It's about social pressures and holding out for success on your own terms: "I gotta keep up with Mr. Jones, and the Devil who eats my brother's bones. When I find him I'll make him wait, as long as my very first date."

My favorite Fire On Fire song is Squeeze Box. I'm not sure but I think it's about an opium trip. The folk verses slide into choruses that sound like doom chamber rock with Colleen's already heavy voice enhanced by a violin or cello. She uses a similar low, ominous, wintery tone in a bunch of her better songs, and I call it her Dark Cathedral sound. Scroll down to the appendices for a playlist.

The Grove (2008)

This was probably recorded before The Orchard, so Squeeze Box was a further development from Colleen's first great full-spectrum vocal performance: The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven. It's also one of their few angry songs, with lyrics are about ecological destruction caused by human progress, and it's the first time Colleen has been backed by the noisy chords that are in Caleb's heavier songs. I love the part at 3:35 when her voice joins the guitar solo.

My favorite on the album is No Gravity Blues, the best minimalist song since Beat Happening's Indian Summer. There's just one electric guitar track, one vocal track, and no structure except that the whole thing is a buildup and resolution around the shocking note at 1:44. At first I thought it might be a stripped down version of its companion, Low Gravity Blues, but now I think Low Gravity Blues is a rocked up version of something divinely inspired. Something Brighter Than The News has a similar sound plus more layers of spookiness. And In The Light Of The Moon is a pretty Caleb song on one of my favorite themes, the conflict between the world of dreams and the depressing material world, with great lyrics. "I used to be a lover from a well-oiled plan, but now I'm just loving the things I don't understand."

'Lectric 'Lashes (2008)

This is a collaboration with the band Visitations. Everything is untitled, most of it is improvised, and the only thing I like is side A track 2, a super-dreamy soft-psych song.

Big Blood and The Bleedin' Hearts (2008)

The Bleedin' Hearts are three other Portland musicians who each play on four songs. One of them is The Birds & The Herds, a catchy Caleb song about animals looking forward to the fall of humanity. Another is Oh Country (Skin & Bones), which sounds like a prettier Song For Baltimore: three verses, wordless wailing choruses, and music that gradually builds. Here's a video of Oh Country live, in which the girl on the mixing board hears the same thing in Colleen's voice that I do.

I love it when the new sounds come in gradually, but it's almost like cheating because each new sound benefits from novelty. It's more challenging to make an audio collage that doesn't build, and Graceless Lady is a good example, nine minutes of verse-chorus-verse drone folk with complexity that holds up over a large number of listens.

Already Gone I and II (2009)

This double album is probably as weird as they've ever been. A few songs seem to have been completely improvised, and Beatle Bones & Smokin Stones is fun and goofy. My favorite Colleen song on the album is a smooth cover of the 80's hit She Sells Sanctuary, and my favorite Caleb song is Breath In A Seed. And on the psych rock instrumental Polly + The Sheep, is that an electric guitar tuned like bagpipes?

Night Terrors On The Isle Of Louis Hardin (2010)

All I hear is amateur dark ambient, and I like it better on Radio Valkyrie.

Operators & Things (2010)

This album is only 20 minutes, with 13 minutes taken up by two big Colleen songs, The Sound and the Sea and Destin Rain. She has talked about being a vessel for some deeper creative source, and Destin Rain stands with Song For Baltimore as the clearest example. They share a similar shock-squeak vocal style, but where Song For Baltimore is the voice of God, Destin Rain is more like the voice of fairies or whimsical aliens. "Destin rain, never wet" -- if I let that line wash over me it makes my scalp tingle, and if I try to grasp it rationally it makes my head hurt.

Caleb does some great short doom folk, South of Portland, another short dark song, Mouth of Seven Tongues, and I love the opening solo in Lay Your Head On The Rails, but what is that instrument?

Dead Songs (2010)

This is their first good album not on the free music archive. The title track is their first full-on rock song and it kicks ass. It's not quite like anything they've done before or since, and it's their only song that I've learned how to play. A Spiral Down is another tight song with great vocals. And New Eyes is a gravelly whispery song that continues to grow on me.

Dark Country Magic (2010)

Big Blood's most popular album is too clean for me. I love Creepin Crazy Time, a polished psych rock upgrade of Talking Head Pt I from Already Gone II. But Colleen's other major songs, She Wander(er) and Coming Home Pt III, lean more toward Stevie Nicks than Cthulhu, and her backing vocals on the Caleb songs are barely audible -- compare Reverse Hymnal to South of Portland. I like their clean sound better on Double Days II.

Big Blood & The Wicked Hex (2011)

If I'd been following Big Blood from the beginning I would have gone apeshit over this album because there was no way to see it coming in terms of style or quality. All five songs are by Colleen, and the most important is Run. It's like they stripped their sound down to nothing and started over: out of a long stormy hiss comes an electric guitar playing single notes in a hypnotic repeating pattern, then at one minute a deep fuzz bass comes in, and at two minutes the vocal track, all of them spare, deliberate, and powerful. Run is a rare song that I like better sober. When I'm high it's like a sketch over which better songs will be painted, and when I'm sober it's like a light that will be filtered into dimmer songs.

The first of these is Never Let Me Go. Like Run it's long, slow and heavy, anchored by a bass riff, but it's more minor key and much more atmospheric, with three choruses bracketing two intervals of towering gloom. I Will Love You is their heaviest song, a noise rock freakout with banshee howls over chanting and feedback. And Keening is a lengthy vocal solo that I haven't been able to get into.

Water, in a completely different way than Song For Baltimore, is Colleen's greatest performance. As always her guitar playing is like Ringo's drumming: so entwined with the needs of each particular song that I don't notice it until I consciously pick the sounds apart. This time the lazy echoey chords are like angels strumming starbeams, and they loosely hold her voice as it soars out of this universe for more than ten minutes. I have to remind myself that this sound was made by humans.

Micah Blue Smaldone Split (2012)

There are more copies of this on eBay than all other Big Blood albums combined, so it must have been distributed differently. Anyway, Micah is a friend who performed on at least one of their albums. He does two songs here and they do three, and they must really like him because this is great stuff. Sister is my favorite full-length Caleb song since 2007. Kentucky Babe is a cover of a song from 1896, with Colleen sounding more unearthly than ever. And The Queen and Her Court is the next stage of the Wicked Hex sound, with chords and vocal soloing like Water, in a verse-chorus structure with an insistent slow rhythm like Run, plus a new kind of smooth texture as they build musical complexity on a new foundation. The way the sounds come together at the end of each chorus is incredible.

Old Time Primitives (2012)

Caleb wins this album. The title track is my favorite Big Blood song without Colleen's voice, although there is a "mystery singer". His other great song, Sirens Knell, sounds like an orc anthem. Colleen has some early drafts of songs that will be perfected later. But how do they know, when they pick the title Leviathan Song Pt I, that it will be that particular song that spawns an improved part two, when it won't be recorded for another two years? Colleen's best song on this album, Out Of Turn, is a noisy take on the Run sound with her heaviest guitar playing.

Radio Valkyrie 1905-1917 (2013)

Almost every Big Blood album is experimental, but usually the experiments are all over the map. This time they're focusing on a specific style: ambient, spooky, and hypnotic. My big favorite is The Mirror Like Sea, a dreamy tapestry of high vocals and whale-like electronics over light psych drone. Also Cast Iron Hand is a good pure instrumental -- compare it to She Said Nothing II from 2007 and notice how their sound has changed.

Everything Is Improving doesn't fit here because of its somewhat normal structure, and doesn't fit anywhere else because it combines mouth harp with filthy heavy guitar and Colleen singing like the queen of the underworld. This is a folk-metal hybrid that should embarrass nordic folk metal, and it gave me the idea that you can measure a song by the awesomeness of the character who would sing it in a musical.

Fight For Your Dinner vol. I (2014)

No sign of a volume two, and they seem to be having fun here, with some short non-musical bits and three covers, including Caleb covering hip hop artist Missy Elliott. There's also some really good stuff. Sick With Information is another beautiful Caleb song about human extinction: "With almanacs and earthquakes, we will all celebrate the end."

Colleen's first song, Fight For Your Dinner, is a dark piano ballad that I imagine being sung by a cartoon feral cat as she moves through a ruined city. Her last song, Twin Skin II, has vocals that are too throat-expanded for my taste, but the music is a compelling blend of fuzz guitar and a high pitched mystery instrument.

You Need Then It Comes took me a whole year to fully appreciate, probably because it's buried in the middle and only three minutes long. The backing music is exceptional, clean and heavy like a space battleship, with the same high instrument as Twin Skin II complementing harmonium and dense, tight electric guitar that bursts in and out of silence. I want them to do a whole album like this.

Unlikely Mothers (2014)

Their most serious album. Every song is over seven minutes and aiming high. Caleb has always sung like Neil Young, and now they're playing like Crazy Horse on It's Alright and Endless Echo. Colleen also has a heavier sound than usual. Away Pt III is thundering psych rock and my favorite thing to crank the volume and sing along. Imagine hearing it on a Jefferson Airplane album and how much better it would be. Here's a live video of Steppin' Time, which also totally rocks. Leviathan Song Pt II, like The Queen And Her Court, is a development of the Wicked Hex sound, with a second guitar track and Colleen really working the low notes.

The opener, A Watery Down I, reminds me of Keening -- despite hearing it many times I can't remember how it goes. But the closer, A Watery Down II, is a completely different song and one of the most ambitious things they've done. They seem to be integrating the best of the Radio Valkyrie sound into the Wicked Hex sound, and the result is a new genre like space lounge music. With a chill bass line, lilting phase guitar, and musically evolving verses coming back to the same chorus, it stretches out to more than 15 minutes and is over too soon. If Song For Baltimore is the sound of ascending to heaven, A Watery Down II is the sound of hanging out there. I think the chorus is "We owe the night a dream / The tomb I lay upon."

Double Days I and II (2015)

I'm not an expert on musical instruments, but it sounds like they got an analog synth and suddenly they're really good at playing it. Listening back through their history, they've had electronic sounds almost from the beginning, and over the last three albums these sounds have gradually shifted from background texture toward lead music, and now they have arrived.

My favorite on Double Days I is a stunning cover of Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan in which Colleen's voice is gradually joined by more and more layers of space music. A cover of the Cure's Disintegration follows the same pattern. For Gardiner Greene Hubbard is a near-instrumental with interesting sounds, and the best original is ...But I Studied. It's the same kind of thing as Keening and A Watery Down I, but the vocals sound better to me, and there are some extra-weird sections with Caleb singing backwards.

I only like one Caleb song on the album, but I really like it. I can't think of a better written love song than Magnetic Green, and it's overlaid with a dense and elegant blend of celestial synth and vocals.

It's not a coincidence that my favorite Big Blood songs are the happiest. Song For Baltimore and The Rise Of Quinnisa Rose have lyrics and music that are unambiguously joyful, Adversaries & Enemies and Destin Rain have lyrics that are harder to interpret, Oh Country combines its ecstatic tone with some sad lyrics, and Water seems to reach a place where extreme happiness and extreme sadness merge into one. But Colleen hasn't had a song with a totally happy vibe since Destin Rain in 2010, and on Double Days II she has two.

I'm not sure about the tone of New Plan, but I love the guest guitar solo. Time Stands Still is a luminous folk song that instead of building up slowly like usual, builds up all at once. And Go See Boats is a work of staggering beauty that's also accessible and catchy. The lyrics are based on something Quinnisa said at the ocean, and it occurs to me that editing a child's chatter into art is a good metaphor for the creative process.

Human Adult Band split single (2015)

One dark and super-catchy song: Half Light Blues. Compare this to Past Time from 2006, where Colleen could channel enough creative power to come up with a 200 note vocal melody and use it only once. Now she and Caleb are so skilled as performers that they can stretch 13 notes into a great song and make it sound easy. If Kurt Cobain were alive he would cover this.

Appendix 1: Dark Cathedral Playlist

A Hole In One
Squeeze Box
The Grove...
Dead Song
Creepin Crazy Time
Run
Never Let Me Go
The Queen And Her Court
Out Of Turn
Everything Is Improving
Fight For Your Dinner
You Need Then It Comes
Away Pt III
Leviathan Song Pt II
Steppin Time Pt II
Half Light Blues

Appendix 2: covers wishlist

Colleen:
R.E.M. - Belong
Norman Greenbaum - Spirit In The Sky
Yazoo - Winter Kills
Gravenhurst - Black Holes In The Sand
Get Well Soon - If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting
Gordon Lightfoot - Cobwebs and Dust
Rush - No One at the Bridge

Caleb:
Neil Young - Love And Only Love
R.E.M. - Underneath The Bunker
Hawkwind - Infinity

Quinnisa:
Camper Van Beethoven - Surprise Truck

Appendix 3: Big Bloodlike songs by other artists

Silver Summit - Child
Bobb Trimble - If Words Were All I Had
Christina Carter - Second Death