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 good to me that I wonder if other people are even hearing the same thing. Is it possible to hallucinate quality, or am I just lucky that something fits my subjective taste so perfectly?

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. I've heard it described as sounding like a 95 year old woman, sounding like a toddler, "discordant screeching", 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 the recording and mixing like he's painting.

On top of that, they're such good songwriters that almost any artist could do an album of Big Blood covers and it would be their best album. In the interview Colleen mentions that lyrics can block creativity because "a word pins you down", and I wasn't surprised to learn that many 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.

This is a work in progress. I only discovered them in August of 2014, and every time I spend an evening listening I have to revise this page to change stuff I thought I figured out in previous drafts. [Nov 30, 2015: upgraded Double Days II. Nov 21: rethought Caleb songs. Nov 12: totally changed playlists.] This process has not slowed down, which means what I don't know is still bigger than what I know, and every time I make a change I'm relieved that (as far as I know) Colleen and Caleb haven't seen this yet. But anyone who wants to discuss the music can email me at ranprieur at gmail.

If you want to listen by exploring certain styles, scroll down or click here for a bunch of three song playlists. Here it is album by album:

Cerberus Shoal

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 lead vocal tracks balanced between the left and right channels. A Quiet Lousy Roar explodes into more voices than I can count, and it took me a long time to get it. And the best single vocal track is Past Time. 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."

Big Blood has folk songs and rock songs, but nothing that I'd call "folk rock". When they combine the two styles it's more like noise folk, and Caleb's Under The Concourse is a great example with a catchy chorus and a timeless vibe. I don't always love Colleen's lead vocals, but I always love her squeaky hillbilly voice when she sings along with Caleb.

Strange Maine 1.20.07

The album opens with a slow goth-folk cover of Erik Satie's First Gnossienne, bleeding into Suffer Creation, a good experiment in eerie multilayer vocals. This is one case where I used an audio editor to combine two overlapping songs into a single mp3.

Sovereignty You Bitch is another noisy Caleb song with some of Colleen's best sing-along vocals. And if you like Caleb's voice, it's especially raw and beautiful in The Fall of Quinnisa Rose.

My favorite on this album is Colleen's cover of the Sumatran pop song Indang Pariaman. At first I dismissed it as some kind of awful Hindu temple chant, but now it's one of the most trippy things I've heard. And Handsome Son of No One is her 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 folk is Colleen's native style, while Caleb's native style is the backwoods garage thrash 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 really lets it rip. A Hole In One is 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.

Caleb owns this album. Don't Trust The Ruin is an epic noise dirge like a postapocalyptic journey through a haunted swamp. It's like he was competing with Sequins to see who could sound more like Tom Waits, and the result is Caleb's Swordfishtrombones moment: from here on he has weirdness on tap, which might be why they named their record company after the song. I can't make out the whole chorus but I imagine the line is "Ever its silence is sound."

Colleen, Quinnisa, Caleb

She Said Nothing is an excellent 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 jaw-dropping songwriting, her voice and Caleb's resonate perfectly, 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 anticipates 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 the title is a puzzle because what does it have in common with Don't Trust The Ruin? Maybe dissonance.

Song For Baltimore is my religion. I believe they were possessed by a metaphysical force of such concentrated benevolence and joy that no one who really hears the song can go on living the same way. 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 lyrics are 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 they might also be about the ecstacy of ego loss in intense social experiences (some things wash away, so you're one thing) or meditation (the choice, every part of this groove is quiet). 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 feels like a bookend to their early albums -- I almost said early years but we're still in 2007. 'Preese 'Preese has interesting trilly vocals, She Said Nothing II is a nice instrumental, Got Wings? sounds more like Tom Waits than Tom himself, and So Po Swing is foot-tapping cartoon bluegrass with a long hypnotic finish. My favorite 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, an improved version of A Friendly Noose from their first album. The verses alternate with an incredible blend of Colleen's voice and a luminous string tremolo, joined by high fuzz guitar like happy insects.

Amnesia is a a catchy song that's either about reincarnation or repeating the same mistakes. And Assanine Race is a bluegrassy song with lyrics 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 deep, sharp voice enhanced by a violin or cello. This ominous, wintery tone will be a big part of their later sound.

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 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 where the vocals join the guitar solo.

No Gravity Blues is 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 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 Oh Country (Skin & Bones), which is 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.

The Birds & The Herds is a catchy song about animals looking forward to the fall of humanity. Notice the call-and-response structure with two different emotional tones, like a righteous preacher and a happy congregation.

I love it when a song keeps adding new sounds, but it's more challenging to make an audio collage where all the sounds are there from the beginning, and Graceless Lady is a good example, nine minutes of verse-chorus-verse drone folk with complexity that keeps sounding better the more you listen.

Already Gone I and II (2009)

This double album is so weird that my favorite song is the most conventional, a smooth cover of the 80's hit She Sells Sanctuary. A few of Colleen's songs seem to have been completely improvised, and Beatle Bones & Smokin Stones is fun and goofy.

Caleb's best song is the bluesy and mournful Breath In A Seed. And on the psych rock instrumental Polly + The Sheep, are those actual bagpipes or did they simulate the sound with guitars?

Night Terrors On The Isle Of Louis Hardin (2010)

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

Operators & Things (2010)

Operators and Things is the title of a classic book by Barbara O'Brien about insanity and the power of the subconscious, and the cover art is clearly based on the book, but I'm not sure about the music. Maybe they chose the title because Destin Rain stands with Song For Baltimore as the clearest example of musical possession by Something deeper. The two songs even have 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.

At only a minute and twenty seconds, South of Portland is Caleb's noise masterpiece. The lyrics seem to be about cleansing, but the sound is pure Halloween -- I imagine it being sung by a choir of monsters and ghosts.

Dead Songs (2010)

This is not on the free music archive, and I wonder if they were trying a different system of collaboration, because I don't like any of Caleb's songs, and Colleen's songs are all dominated by the lyrics, with clearly enunciated words and relatively simple backing music.

Dead Song is a full-on rock song that kicks ass. It's my favorite thing to sing when I'm riding my scooter or driving alone. The lyrics seem to be about the dead waiting to reincarnate, or about listening to ancestors.

A Spiral Down is another tightly structured song with great vocals. Curtain Call is a sad harmonium ballad. New Eyes is a gravelly whispery song that continues to grow on me. And I can't get into The Archivist & The Archeologist, but when Colleen sings like an ordinary person about ordinary stuff, it's a reminder that when she sings like a witch about the beauty of death, that's just the world's best artistic persona.

Dark Country Magic (2010)

Big Blood's most popular album is polished and cautious. I love Creepin Crazy Time, a psych rock upgrade of Talking Head Pt I from Already Gone II. Colleen's other major songs, She Wander(er) and Coming Home Pt III, lean more toward Stevie Nicks than Cthulhu, and Caleb's songs lack sharp edges -- compare Reverse Hymnal to South of Portland.

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. Depending on my mental state, sometimes Run sounds like a light that will be filtered into later songs, and sometimes it sounds like a sketch over which later songs will be painted.

The first of these is Never Let Me Go. Like Run it's long and slow with a deep bass riff, but it's more minor key and much more atmospheric. The three choruses are bait to get you to listen to the two towering thunderheads between them.

Between those two, I Will Love You is Colleen's heaviest song, a noise rock freakout with banshee howls over chanting and feedback. And after them is Keening, 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)

With flanged vocals over psych-sludge music, Old Time Primitives is Caleb's coolest song, his catchiest song, and one of his few songs without Colleen's voice, although there is a "mystery singer". His other great song, Sirens Knell, sounds like an orc anthem. It's similar to Don't Trust The Ruin, but sharper, louder, and less atmospheric.

Colleen has lower-numbered versions of Away and Leviathan Song, which will reappear on Unlikely Mothers, so I assumed these were early drafts. But there are YouTube videos of them playing basically the 2014 versions of Away and Steppin Time on their European tour in 2011. My guess is that Away Pt III came first, and parts I and II are experimental variations; but Leviathian Song Pt I came first and Pt II is an upgrade. Also, Out Of Turn is a noisy take on the Run sound with Colleen's heaviest lead guitar.

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. 40 Days and 40 Nights repeats the same verse ten or eleven times, but every time I try to take an exact count I fall asleep.

My big favorite is The Mirror Like Sea, a dreamy tapestry of high vocals and whale-like electronics over light psych drone. And Cast Iron Hand is a good pure instrumental -- compare it to She Said Nothing II from 2007.

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 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. Sick With Information might be the happiest doom song ever: "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, is a rare case where she sings with her throat fully expanded. Professionals are trained to do this and I usually hate it, but here it sounds pretty good, and the backing music is a compelling blend of fuzz guitar and a high pitched mystery instrument. Is it a theremin?

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 music is clean and heavy like a space battleship, with the same high instrument as Twin Skin II complementing accordion (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)

A serious double album. They're both in top form and every song is over seven minutes. Caleb has always sung like Neil Young, and now they're playing like Crazy Horse on It's Alright and Endless Echo, a song I didn't appreciate until I listened to it loud. And Thumbnail Moon is Caleb's longest and heaviest song, nine minutes of industrial sludge with awesome doom lyrics. Could anyone have predicted this from how they sounded in 2007?

Colleen's songs are also heavier 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 well-crafted 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. But the lyrics place heaven physically below us -- among the comprehensible words are "gravity" and at least three instances of "down". Like David Abram's book Becoming Animal, Colleen views gravity as the love of the earth to which all things return. I think the chorus is "We owe the night a dream / The tomb I lay upon."

Double Days I (2015)

I'm not an expert on musical instruments, but it sounds like they got an analog synth and 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 track 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 does the same thing with a completely different kind of song. 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.

Double Days II (2015)

I wonder if they made a conscious decision to filter their audience by putting the experimental stuff on DDI and the accessible originals on DDII. Anyway this is their cleanest album yet, and I like it much better than Dark Country Magic. You can hear the difference by comparing She Wander(er) from that album with New Plan from this one: the 2010 sound was loose and watery, and the 2015 sound is tight and airy.

Also this album has great songwriting. I can't think of a better written love song than Magnetic Green, and it's overlaid with a dense and elegant collage of celestial synth and vocals. "I will marry your song to my sound / I will bury my roots in your ground."

Micah's Old Room is a lovely sharp-edged little gem, and Time Stands Still is like a wedding song from mystical ancient Scotland, except the lyrics are more like a happy funeral. It's unusual for being in 3 time, and for getting noisy all at once instead of gradually.

And Go See Boats is a work of staggering beauty with lyrics based on something Quinnisa said at the ocean. When I wrote them down I realized they're totally metaphysical: we are all "minor seacoasts" in the ocean of universal consciousness, and to "walk on water" is to fully connect with others, or maybe to die. Colleen's best lyrics are like divine wisdom through Google Translate, and this could be a verse from Ecclesiastes:

You've got some fun, speak your own
Creation without us untying to your bone
Promise in this day time
Do your things

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.