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 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 her voice more creatively than any singer yet.

I understood this better when I saw Ariana Grande on Saturday Night Live: she can do spot-on impressions of the styles of other singers, but her own style is completely boring. As with any means of expression, imitation is a relatively common skill, and the rare skill is to come up with an interesting original voice. Bob Dylan did it once, Robert Plant did it once, and Colleen has done it a bunch of times because she tries to do it again on every song. Her most powerful songs are all variations on one voice: a dense, laser-focused shrillness that my girlfriend calls "being repeatedly stabbed with knives."

Even if she were an ordinary singer, Big Blood 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?"

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. [3/21/2016, attempting to merge playlists.] 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 the ears of the future who might one day hear the same thing in Big Blood that I hear.

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. If you want to listen by exploring certain styles, scroll down or click here for a bunch of chronological playlists. And 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 how good Colleen's vocal control was before she set her voice free. 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. Compare it to Window In Time and notice the huge jump in musical complexity.

A lot of songs sound better to me after repeated listens, but no song has ever climbed as far as A Quiet Lousy Roar (and marijuana was a big help). 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 in 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 perfect composition, 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. The great song is Haystack, and for a long time I thought it was average because I couldn't get a grip on anything but the choruses. Now I think the choruses are the least interesting part. The rest of the song plunges deliriously in and out of chaos in a way that oddly reminds me Big Star's third album -- after I understood Haystack I suddenly understood Kangaroo.

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 power it has over me, and now 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. It also reminds me of Lon Lon Ranch from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, but much more intense. If you're only a little bit insane, this is Colleen's most beautiful song, and the song whose lack of popularity puzzles me the most. Here's a video of Oh Country live in which the girl on the mixing board hears the same thing that I do.

They also play on The Birds & The Herds, 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. Okay, I don't like the verses, but I love the choruses, and the guitar at the end is the most beautiful sound Big Blood has ever made without vocals.

And Graceless Lady is a major song, a drone folk epic that manages to be inspired, complex, and accessible for nearly nine minutes. If I could play only one song to introduce a random person to Big Blood, it might be this.

Already Gone I and II (2009)

This double album is so experimental 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.

Breath In A Seed is deep cowboy blues, like something that would be played around a campfire in a Cormac McCarthy novel. 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 creative process, because Colleen's songs all have clearly enunciated lyrics and relatively simple backing music, as if the lyrics were written in a notebook and then the songs were built around them.

Dead Song is my favorite song by anyone to sing. If I were a UFC fighter, this would be my walkout song. If Big Blood were a classic rock band, this would be the one you'd hear on the radio. The lyrics seem to be about the dead waiting to reincarnate, or about listening to ancestors.

I also like to sing New Eyes, maybe because I can understand the words and hit all the notes, and it has kept sounding better over a surprising number of listens. A Spiral Down is a tight song with great vocals, good enough to be on one of my playlists but the style doesn't fit anywhere. And with its 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)

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 fits, because whenever I hear a song that's too bullshitty, I play South of Portland to clean my brain. And Mouth of Seven Tongues is the same kind of thing, short and super-edgy. The title must come from the song having one verse that's repeated seven times.

Operators and Things is the title of a classic book by Barbara O'Brien about insanity and the power of the subconscious, including creative power, so I wonder if they chose the title because Destin Rain stands with Song For Baltimore as an 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. And where Song For Baltimore has a relatively simple structure -- three peaks, each one higher, doing the same thing with more intensity -- Destin Rain has a complex structure like nothing I've ever heard. It starts with a normal musical buildup to what sound like verses, but they're never repeated, just more intro to one long rise and fall, with a plateau at the top with three peaks, three completely different flashes of perfect happiness in less than a minute. On each side of the plateau is the line "The day is long, the bail is set." I think the "day" is one human life, because the other lyrics are clearly about the stages of life, and the "bail" is a spiritual debt that we pay off by living, engaging with the world of flesh to re-enter the world of spirit. (Like Colleen I was raised Catholic.) The title line, "Destin rain, never wet", is my definition of poetry, because if I let it wash over me it makes my scalp tingle, and if I try to grasp it rationally it makes my head hurt.

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 plugged 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 don't click with me. Reverse Hymnal is similar to South of Portland and Mouth of Seven Tongues, and more complex, but I don't like how the vocals are muffled.

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 a dirge by Caleb, similar to Breath In A Seed but heavier. 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. My interpretation, which fits only some of the lyrics, is that 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 grooviest song and one of my favorites on weed. It's easily the best song that I couldn't fit into any of the playlists. 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 that 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 (the song is so doomy that my mp3 player temporarily died while playing it). And 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 that makes me want 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, and I like to listen to it right before bed. 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 since the first song on their first album, but 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 the mysteriously titled ...But I Studied is in a similar ethereal style, but less structured. There's also a great cover of The Cure's Disintegration -- I thought it fell short of the original until I 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. (These might be Colleen's two songs that are most similar.)

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 high-class ear candy. 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, heavy, catchy song: Half Light Blues. If Kurt Cobain were alive he would cover this. The sound is less organic and more metallic than they've ever been, and I'm curious to see if this style thread continues.

Appendix 1: Playlists

This is the main thing I've been working on lately, and for a while I had separate playlists for Colleen and Caleb to better hear the threads through time in their music. I've just now tried combining them, so there are still some kinks to work out. All of these are chronological except for some jiggling of the early songs in the core happy playlist.

Light 2004-2010: Window In Time, The Fall of Quinnisa Rose, She Said Nothing, Night Lighter, She Sells Sanctuary, New Eyes, Coming Home Pt III.

Heavy 2010-2015: Dead Song, I Will Love You, Everything Is Improving, Away Pt III, It's Alright, Endless Echo, Half Light Blues.

The Core Big Blood Unbearably Happy Psychedelic Folk Playlist: Full Of Smoke, Adversaries & Enemies, Hangman, Oh Country, The Rise of Quinnisa Rose, Song For Baltimore, The Birds & The Herds, Destin Rain, Sick With Information, Go See Boats, Magnetic Green.

Celestial Colleen (multitrack vocals): All Operations, Haystack, Something Brighter Than The News, Graceless Lady, The Queen and Her Court, A Watery Down II, Time Stands Still.

Deep Celestial Colleen (one vocal track): Past Time, No Gravity Blues, Water.

Early Weird Colleen: A Quiet Lousy Roar, Indang Pariman, Glory Daze, Sequins, Vitamin C, Don't Trust The Ruin II.

Gothic: Squeeze Box, The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven, South Of Portland, Mouth of Seven Tongues, Creepin Crazy Time, Run, Never Let Me Go, Fight For Your Dinner, You Need Then It Comes.

Mournful Caleb: In The Light Of The Moon, Breath In A Seed, Sister, Song For Herb.

Caleb's Weird Doom Trilogy: Don't Trust The Ruin, Sirens Knell, Thumbnail Moon.

Appendix 2: covers wishlist

Timber Timbre - Grand Canyon. Taylor Kirk's songwriting is a near-perfect match for the style of Colleen's darker songs -- even his lyrics are Kinsellesque. They could almost cover the entire Hot Dreams album and take it through the roof in the style of Never Let Me Go.

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. Again, listen to Never Let Me Go and imagine what they could do with this.

Cocteau Twins - Pandora. It's hard to imagine anyone improving on this, but Colleen could nail the vocal tracks, and I'd like it better without the snappy 80's drums.

The Lay Llamas - Archaic Revival. Just a great fit for their sound in every way.

Gravenhurst - Black Holes In The Sand. Other than the vocals, this already sounds so much like Big Blood that a cover might be pointless, but I'd still like to hear it.

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.

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.

Rush - Cygnus X-1 or Blue Oyster Cult - Astronomy. 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.

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.