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 almost question my sanity: are they an unlikely perfect fit for my subjective taste, do I have an unlikely ability to recognize objective quality, or am I doing this inside my own head?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. And it's not just a matter of talent -- there are singers who could even better if they had more courage, while Yoko Ono or the Sun City Girls sing with more courage than talent, and Colleen has both.
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.
Their music is so broad and deep that no two of their nearly 200 songs have quite the same sound, and if you asked fifty people for their favorite you would probably get forty answers. And 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 revise this page to add stuff and fix mistakes. Every time I make a change I'm relieved that (as far as I know) Colleen and Caleb haven't seen this yet. My imaginary audience is other fans, and 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 chronological playlists. Here it is album by album:
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. At the time she and Caleb were in a band called Cerberus Shoal, and I've tried to get into them, but so far the only thing I really like is from 3:20-4:10 of Baby Gal.My favorite track on Collsing is a pretty folk song called Window In Time, and the interesting thing is that Colleen's vocal control is already perfect. A year before I discovered Big Blood, I got obsessed with Joanna Newsom's voice on The Milk-Eyed Mender album, and what first drew me to Big Blood was that Colleen does the same kind of thing. But Joanna Newsom's earlier voice is clumsy and her later voice is washed out -- she stumbled in and out of being an incredible singer without knowing how she did it. Colleen got there from a strong foundation and with full awareness, and has been able to stay there for years.
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 All Operations can have two lead vocal tracks balanced between the left and right channels. As the first song on their first album, I wonder if it was supposed to be a statement of their sound, but they've never done anything that quite matches its echoey depth, patient melodies, and sparkly notes.Once a week I get high and listen to music, and no song is more improved by marijuana than A Quiet Lousy Roar. At first I thought it was a pretentious failed experiment, and now I think it's the mother of all weirdness: backed only by percussion, Colleen squeaks nonsense and finally explodes into a glimmery cacophony.
And the album's 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.
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.Sovereignty You Bitch is another noisy Caleb song with some of Colleen's best hillbilly 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 luminous and 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."
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. This is a high-stakes performance of a perfectly written song, with two absolutely raw voices merging into something almost unbearably alive, and then Colleen's 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. Here's a live version by Fire On Fire.Vitamin C is a cover of the krautrock band Can. Colleen's vocals are cold and bright like an ice storm, and the insistent airtight backing music would be good enough to carry the song on its own. Compare it to the softer sound in Satie's First Gnossienne.
Don't Trust The Ruin II sounds like Joanna Newsom's ghost covering "Bela Lugosi's Dead", and the title is surprising because the songwriting is like a refinement of A Quiet Lousy Roar, and only the dissonant vibe resembles Don't Trust The Ruin.
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. My favorite is Haystack, a long sleepy song with complex multitrack vocals, and 'Preese 'Preese is also interesting.Caleb has at least two songs that took me a long time to get. Got Wings? is not just a Tom Waits knockoff, because there are many aspects to Tom's sound and Caleb picks a hard one and totally nails it. And So Po Swing is foot-tapping cartoon bluegrass with a long hypnotic finish.
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 wonder if they took their name from Swinburne's poem "Laus Veneris": "Her eyelids on her eyes like flower on flower, Mine eyelids on mine eyes like fire on fire." Anyway 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 the difficulty of living mindfully. That's a live rehearsal by Fire On Fire, and here's another live Amnesia with just Big Blood. 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 and "squeeze box" means the body. Notice how the verses and choruses have radically different sounds -- the verses are pure folk while the choruses are like doom chamber rock. This ominous, wintery tone will be a big part of their later sound, so I think of this song as a boundary marker, with the verses looking backward and the choruses looking forward.
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 has 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. The more I listen to it the more perfect it sounds, and it demands my attention so strongly that if it came on the car stereo I would have to shut it off or pull over. The title and the lyrics vaguely suggest that it's about a tired relationship, but I prefer to imagine that it's about a transcendent experience.
At first I thought No Gravity Blues could 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. And Something Brighter Than The News has a similar eerie vibe with more layers.
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 that reminds me of O Willow Waly from the movie The Innocents.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. If you're only a little bit insane, this is Colleen's most beautiful song. Here's a video of Oh Country live in which the girl on the mixing board hears the same thing 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.
Graceless Lady is a nine minute drone folk epic with a great blend of sounds. This was the first Big Blood song I heard, and now I wish the backing music had more of an edge, but at the time it was the perfect thing to get me to listen to more.
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)
If you like Radio Valkyrie, you might want to listen to this as an earlier exercise in the same kind of thing.Dead Songs (2010)
This is not on the free music archive, and I wonder if they were trying a different collaboration process, because 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. If Big Blood were a classic rock band, this would be the one you'd hear on the radio all the time, and it's my favorite to sing. 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, and it might be the best song that I wasn't able to fit into any of the playlists. New Eyes is a gravelly whispery song that continues to grow on me. And with its relatively straightforward lyrics and unstyled vocals, The Archivist & The Archeologist might be the song where Colleen's artistic persona comes closest to her everyday self.
In this video for Caleb's song Daughter, you can see a bunch of Colleen's art including some good stuff that's not on their album covers.
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 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 sound is pure Halloween, but the the lyrics seem to be about cleansing -- which is appropriate, because whenever I hear a song that's too bullshitty, I play South of Portland to clean my brain.
Dark Country Magic (2010)
Big Blood's most popular album is smooth and clean, but still somewhat weird. I wonder if the minimalist opener, Oh My Child, was improvised. When I put a bunch of Big Blood songs into Shazam to try to find similar sounds, I discovered that Oh My Child was sampled by a German rap duo in this track.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 are light and pretty, and She Wander(er) has a line, "Feed on the air and water of love", that will be the foundation of the song Water on their next album.
Caleb's songs are well written but the recording sounds muffled -- 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. On Already Gone II they do a swampy voodoo cover of Blondie's Heart of Glass, which happened to be my favorite song when I was 13, and the cover doesn't impress me. But Never Let Me Go puts the hypnotic bass and drum pattern from Heart of Glass through a deep sludge filter with razor-goth vocals and it nearly makes Blondie obsolete. You can especially hear this in the sections from 2:50-3:50 and 4:50-6:10 -- these are the meat of the song and the three choruses are the shiny wrapping.
Between those two, I Will Love You is Colleen's heaviest song, a noise rock freakout with banshee howls over chanting and feedback. It sounds like a teenage party in the year 2250. 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. I think the lyrics are an extended metaphor: the Queen is their music, "my true love" is Caleb, and the unnecessary armor is in case they make it big.
Old Time Primitives (2012)
With flanged vocals over psych-sludge music, Old Time Primitives is Caleb's coolest 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 from their European tour in 2011, with the 2014 versions of Away and Steppin Time already fully formed. 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 some heavy 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 an ambient spooky style that's a lot like the quiet parts of This Heat's 1979 self-titled album. Or maybe they're going in the direction of another fringe couple band, Natural Snow Buildings.Anyway, the opener, 40 Days and 40 Nights, is so hypnotic that when I tried to count the verses I kept falling asleep. And Cast Iron Hand is a good instrumental -- compare it to She Said Nothing II from 2007.
Big Blood is often categorized as psychedelic folk, and no song better fits that tag than Secret Garden, but the sound is so challenging that it took me a lot of listens to get it. "If the world would go away we'd open up... and if the world would open up, the world would go away." On the first listen, my favorite was The Mirror Like Sea, a dreamy tapestry of high vocals and whale-like electronics over light psych drone.
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 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 this is one of their funnest and most creative albums, with 17 tracks including several covers and non-musical bits. The title 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.In Twin Skin I and II, Colleen experiments with a vocal style where she seems to be expanding her throat differently. It doesn't quite work for me, but I love the music in Twin Skin II, a compelling blend of fuzz guitar and a high pitched mystery instrument, maybe 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 harmonium and dense, tight electric guitar that bursts in and out of silence. I want them to do a whole album like this.
Caleb's great song is Sick With Information. It's like a happy campfire song about human extinction, and in the line about almanacs and earthquakes, it's the best they've sung together in years.
Unlikely Mothers (2014)
It's not on the free music archive, but this is a serious double album with every song 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.
At the end of Leviathan Song II, and in most of A Watery Down I and II, Colleen continues to play with the Twin Skin vocal style, and it finds its best fit in A Watery Down II. It's like they're 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. Because of its length and my habit of playing it before bed, I've spent far more time listening to this than any other Big Blood song. Among the comprehensible words are "gravity" and at least three instances of "down", but this is a happy song. Like David Abram's book Becoming Animal, Colleen views gravity as the love of the earth to which all things return. "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.Planet Caravan is a stunning Black Sabbath cover. And I wonder if ...But I Studied got its title because they were aiming for something that they failed to achieve. It's no Water, but I like it better than Keening and A Watery Down I. After many listens, my favorite on the album is a cover of The Cure's Disintegration. I thought it fell short of the original until I actually compared them side by side.
Double Days II (2015)
This is their cleanest album yet, and I like it 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 it has some great songwriting. Under its dense collage of celestial synth and vocals, Magnetic Green is one of the best love songs you'll ever hear. "I will marry your song to my sound / I will bury my roots in your ground."
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.
When I listened to a bunch of Loreena McKennitt, I was surprised how similar she and Colleen are, but where McKennitt goes for high studio polish, Big Blood goes for light through the cracks. As they get deeper into their career, they're getting better at polish, and Go See Boats is a perfect arrangement of absolutely beautiful sounds. The lyrics are based on something Quinnisa said at the ocean, and 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. If Kurt Cobain were alive he would cover this. It's like they're taking Colleen's gothic sound in a new direction, less organic and more metallic, and I'll be curious to see if this style thread continues.Appendix 1: Colleen Playlists
Light: Window In Time, She Sells Sanctuary, New Eyes, She Wander(er), Coming Home Pt III, Disintegration, New Plan.
Celestial: All Operations, Past Time, Haystack, No Gravity Blues, Something Brighter Than The News, Graceless Lady, Water, The Queen and Her Court, Kentucky Babe, Go See Boats, A Watery Down II.Divine Invasion: Indang Pariman, Adversaries & Enemies, Song For Baltimore, Oh Country, Destin Rain, Time Stands Still.
Weird 2007: A Quiet Lousy Roar, Glory Daze, Sequins, Vitamin C, Don't Trust The Ruin II.
Heavy / Gothic: Squeeze Box, The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven, Dead Song, Creepin Crazy Time, Run, I Will Love You, Never Let Me Go, Out Of Turn, Everything Is Improving, Fight For Your Dinner, You Need Then It Comes, Away Pt III, Leviathan Song Pt II, Half Light Blues.
Appendix 2: Caleb Playlists
Folk 2007: Hangman, She Said Nothing, The Rise of Quinnisa Rose.Light: The Fall of Quinnisa Rose, Night Lighter, Magnetic Green.
Heavy: Sovereignty You Bitch, Sister, Endless Echo.
Groove: So Po Swing, The Birds & The Herds, Old Time Primitives.
Light Doom: In The Light Of The Moon, Breath In A Seed, Sick With Information.
Weird Doom: Don't Trust The Ruin, Got Wings?, South Of Portland, Sirens Knell, Thumbnail Moon.
Appendix 3: covers wishlist
Get Well Soon - If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting. If I pretend this is a Big Blood song, it's one of their best. I hear Colleen singing the low lead and both of them singing the high backup.Yazoo - Winter Kills. Listen to Never Let Me Go and imagine what they could do with this.
Rush - Cygnus X-1 or Blue Oyster Cult - Astronomy or Genesis - Supper's Ready. I'm serious! You Need Then It Comes showed that they can do clean structural edges and sounds that turn on a dime. I want them to go deeper into prog rock, and these are the best classic prog songs.
David Bowie - After All. With songs like this, Bowie added a new color to popular music and set the cornerstone of whole genres. But now that we've heard everything it influenced, a great band could play it better.
The Lay Llamas - Archaic Revival. Just a perfect fit for their sound on every level, and I'd like them to try playing psych drone with this much tightness.
Gravenhurst - Black Holes In The Sand. This already sounds like Big Blood, and I'm not sure they could improve it, but I want them to try something this song does really well: sharp-edged clean notes.
Norman Greenbaum - Spirit In The Sky. Big Blood is the most qualified band to cover this because of Everything Is Improving.
Gordon Lightfoot - Summertime Dream. Lightfoot's happiest song is super-cheesy, but it reminds me of how good Colleen and Caleb sound together in The Rise of Quinnisa Rose or the choruses of The Birds and The Herds.
Neil Young - Love And Only Love. Again, those voices together, this time in a heavy song.
Hawkwind - Infinity. And again in a spacy collage.
Cocteau Twins - Pandora. Okay, this is already perfect, but I can imagine something impossibly better with Colleen's Oh Country voice.
Steve Mauldin - The Abominable O Holy Night. When I mentioned wild beauty in bad music, I was thinking of this song. By pushing his voice past ridiculous, Mauldin achieves mind-blowing sound textures, but he's intentionally missing the notes, and Colleen is one of the few people alive who might hit the notes and sound like this.