Big Blood

Big Blood are Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin, a married couple in Portland, Maine, who have averaged more than two home-recorded albums a year since 2007. Their music sounds so much better to me than to anyone I know that I've become cautious about sharing it outside of this page. It seems like the better a song is, the more its beauty is encrypted in sonic textures so alien that most people just hear weird noise.

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, a toddler, a witch, a cat, "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 I've heard.

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 forgettable. 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 almost tries to do it again on every song.

The only other singer I would put on the same level is Melanie Safka, and I write more about her below. Colleen's voice is weirder and darker, with a wider range in every dimension, but Melanie's voice has the same edge while being much stronger and warmer. It's like the difference between the moon and the sun.

The other difference is Caleb. In this podcast interview Colleen reveals that Caleb sees colors in sounds, and he does the recording and mixing like he's painting. That's the other heart of their sound, and even if Colleen 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.

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 real 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 now I'm in a highly rewarding feedback loop: listening to the music, taking notes, coming here to put it into words, and then using those words to guide my next round of listening, which corrects my inadequate understanding. I continue to feel relieved that (as far as I know) Colleen and Caleb haven't seen this yet, and I wouldn't want them to see it until at least 2018.

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 last.fm page, 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 some 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 the one bit from Cerberus Shoal that I would put on the same level as Big Blood is from 3:20-4:10 of Baby Gal.

Of all the tracks on Collsing, Ballad Of The 13 Year Old is the clearest example of proto-Big Blood, with threads that will be in Colleen's songs for years: dissonant guitar picking, multitrack vocals, slippery lyrics, and her voice even has a bit of a dark edge.

Window In Time is a pretty folk song, and the most interesting thing is that Colleen's vocal control is already excellent. 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, like she stumbled in and out of being an incredible singer without knowing how she did it, while Colleen 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. Anyway, the more I listen to this, the more I think it's their best complete album. No other album by anyone has such consistently high quality across such a variety of styles -- especially if you replace A Friendly Noose with Hangman, an upgrade recorded less than a year later.

The opener, All Operations, is sparkly space folk with Colleen singing two lead vocal tracks from the left and right channels. The song takes a long time to get going, with no structure or melody in the first 90 seconds, and I think this was a calculated move to filter their audience. Like a lot of their songs, you have to surrender some time and attention to hear how good it is.

A Quiet Lousy Roar is even less accessible. For a while 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.

Full Of Smoke is a taste of sounds to come, with Colleen singing like an angel and the two of them singing together like ecstatic hillbillies. By adjusting to fit Caleb's voice on songs like this, I think she added a dimension to her voice that will later drive some of their greatest songs.

The album's best single vocal track, and the only song I liked on the first listen, 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."

A lot of Big Blood songs are in a grey area between folk and rock, but I would never call them "folk rock" because they combine the sounds differently than anyone else, and better. Under The Concourse is a fuzz-folk masterpiece with timeless choruses that are heavy, organic, and catchy in a way that no other song can quite match.

Strange Maine 1.20.07

Sovereignty You Bitch isn't as warm as Under The Concourse, but it's louder and tighter, with Colleen adding jump-out-of-your-chair sing-along vocals. And if you like Caleb's falsetto, it's especially raw and beautiful in The Fall of Quinnisa Rose.

The opener is a slow goth-folk cover of Erik Satie's First Gnossienne, and you need to be in a slow mental state to fully appreciate it. And the closer, A Goddamn Spell, is a bold combination of styles.

My favorite on this album is a cover of the Sumatran pop song Indang Pariaman. At first I dismissed it as some kind of awful Hindu temple chant, but now it's one of the most luminous and trippy things I've heard. And Handsome Son of No One is Colleen's classiest song, like something you'd hear at an elite music school in the distant past or future. Notice how much heavier the choruses are than the verses while still being in the same subgenre of music. I like to imagine that this ethereal avant-garde chamber folk is her 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.

She Said Nothing is an excellent folk song with impressive string plucking, and I can hear Colleen's influence in Caleb's heady lyrics and punctuated singing style (or he's singing lead on a song she wrote). 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 blows off the roof. 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 a clue to how they think about music, because the structure is like A Quiet Lousy Roar, and it's the spooky dissonant vibe that resembles Don't Trust The Ruin. I can't believe how long this was staring me in the face before I put the songs back to back in a playlist.

Song For Baltimore is my religion. Sometimes in a dream I'll hear music that's better than any real music could possibly be, but Song For Baltimore is that good -- I'm afraid if I hear it too many times I'll wake up. Colleen's voice holds a wild beauty that I've only ever heard in intentionally bad music and the howls of coyotes. It's like a bolt of lightning that doesn't stop, and it rises to impossible heights and then higher as the low end fills with electric guitar and monk-like chanting. This is what Christmas songs are trying to be. Song For Baltimore is the key that opens my brain to the light behind the world. I make hard decisions by asking what would Song For Baltimore do. I think the 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.



I love this song so much because, on top of my favorite band's sound, they've stacked another sound that is even more shockingly beautiful. It seems impossible that they can sound better than anyone has sounded before in so many ways -- and it is, but it was only after Song For Baltimore rewired my brain, that I began to fully appreciate its musical ancestors. One of these is Melanie Safka, who recorded under the name Melanie and had a huge hit with Brand New Key. Her strongest original is probably Lay Down, and Song For Baltimore is like the next generation of her cover of Ruby Tuesday, or it's like an extension of the peak verse of Lay Lady Lay. And I'm not saying this was an influence on Big Blood, but a big influence on why I like this song so much is that it sounds like Rush, especially 2112. Listen to the pace of Geddy Lee's vocals in The Temples Of Syrinx, or their intensity in Soliloquy. I don't know of any other precedent for such powerfully weird vocals backed up by such heavy music.

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. Frost Farm is a good folk song, 'Preese 'Preese is one of Colleen's happiest weird songs, and her great song is Haystack. For a long time I thought it was average because I couldn't get a grip on anything but the choruses. Now I can hear the entire song plunging 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? sounds like Tom Waits in a way that even Tom Waits can barely pull off. 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, including members of Cerberus Shoal. 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, a much 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 bright, 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 think it's about having a religious experience while drugged in the hospital: the squeeze box is the body, and identity is an illusion, but one we have to work with. 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. 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, which totally doesn't fit the intensity of the performance.

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 tribute. 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. Oh Country is three-time drone -- how rare is that? 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 Big Blood's most beautiful song, and the one whose lack of popularity baffles 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.

The Bleedin' Hearts 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. The guitar at the end is the most beautiful non-vocal sound in any Big Blood song.

And Graceless Lady is a major work, a drone folk epic that manages to be inspired, complex, and accessible for nearly nine minutes. The emotional tone of the music and vocals is exactly in the center between Colleen's happy songs and her dark songs. 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.

Caleb's Breath In A Seed is deep cowboy blues, like something that would be played around a campfire in a Cormac McCarthy novel. And Polly + The Sheep is a psych rock jam with something that sounds like bagpipes. Compare it to Yo La Tengo's Spec Bebop, another case where a great band made a stoner instrumental a long way from their usual sound.

Night Terrors On The Isle Of Louis Hardin (2010)

If you like Radio Valkyrie, you might like 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, and its deep whispery tone has kept sounding better over a surprising number of listens. A Spiral Down is another tight song with great vocals. 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. It has the same structure as Song For Baltimore: three peaks, each one higher, doing the same thing with more intensity.

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. Its structure is complex 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 long plateau at the top whose highest peaks are all doing different things, one unique flash of perfect happiness after another. The closest thing to a chorus is sung only twice, once at the very peak of the song and again during its decline, and right before the first is the line "It came and it went away." Also sung twice, bracketing 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 about the stages of life, and the "bail" is a debt that we pay off by living, engaging with the world of flesh to earn a place in the world of spirit (those stars used to be rocks). If I let the title wash over me it makes my scalp tingle, and if I try to grasp it rationally it makes my head hurt: "Destin rain, never wet."

Dark Country Magic (2010)

Big Blood's most popular album is polished 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.

My big favorite is 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.

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. 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. This song is Run, and I can't tell if it's a light that will be filtered into later songs, or 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. But Never Let Me Go takes another angle, putting the hypnotic bass and drum pattern from Heart of Glass through a deep sludge filter with razor wire vocals and the result is the most gothic thing I've ever heard, Big Blood's dark sun. The two hearts of the song are the sections from 2:50-3:50 and 4:50-6:10, and the three choruses are the shiny black wrapping.

Between those two, I Will Love You is a noise rock freakout with banshee howls over chanting and feedback. This could be a medieval vision of what hell sounds like, or it could be a teenage party in the year 2250. I can't even tell whose song it is -- Colleen sings lead but the underlying structure is more like Caleb.

Water, in its own way, is Colleen's greatest performance. As always her guitar playing is like Ringo's drumming: so entwined with the needs of each song that I don't notice it until I consciously pick the sounds apart. Here the guitar feels so much like gentle waves of water that it can't be a coincidence, and I wonder how long they worked to get it right. Then Colleen's voice soars out of this universe for more than ten minutes. This is what songs in David Lynch movies are trying to be. 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 with Fire On Fire and on a few Big Blood 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, holding the center between doomy and pretty and heavy and light. Kentucky Babe is a cover of a song from 1896, with thick reverb making Colleen sound 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 mind-blowing. 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 my favorite Big Blood song where I can't hear Colleen's voice (but there is a "mystery singer"). His other songs are very doomy, and the best is Sirens Knell, which sounds like an orc anthem, similar to Don't Trust The Ruin but sharper, louder, and less atmospheric.

Shadows For The Land sounds like it's going to be another one of these, but then it's Colleen singing. I understood it better after hearing But I Studied on Double Days I. And her most accessible song is Out Of Turn, a noisy take on the Run sound with some heavy lead guitar.

They also have 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 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 a filled out version.

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. Cast Iron Hand is a good instrumental -- compare it to She Said Nothing II from 2007. And 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.

Secret Garden reminds me of Crocodile Dundee, because "You call that psychedelic folk? This is psychedelic folk." 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."

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 another song that reminds me of Rush, 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 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 I haven't wrapped my ears around yet, but in Twin Skin II it blends into a fascinating celestial soundscape like robot church music.

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 (and also a doom metal album).

Caleb's great song is Sick With Information. It's like a happy campfire song about human extinction, and I think 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, a song that would fit right in on Ragged Glory. Endless Echo is colder, sharper, and even heavier -- I didn't fully appreciate it until I heard it loud. And Thumbnail Moon is similar but weirder, 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 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. Steppin' Time also totally rocks -- that's a live performance with more edge than the studio version.

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 the song the whole tone switches from dark to light, or from gothic to hippie, and I'm still trying to figure out how to work it into a playlist.

In that section, 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 going to sleep. Among the comprehensible words are "gravity" and at least three instances of "down". Like David Abram's book Becoming Animal, this song 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)

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. It sounds oddly like a light version of I Will Love You. 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, and there's no better couplet in English than "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 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 top-grade 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. These lyrics are like divine wisdom through Google Translate:

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.

Playlists

This section is totally in flux. I use these lists now as the foundation of my listening, and I can't listen for 20 minutes without switching stuff around. Each list is roughly chronological, but I might move songs up to a year in either direction to get a better fit. And I'm starting to allow songs to appear on multiple lists, especially the final list.

Intro Playlist: Window In Time, The Fall of Quinnisa Rose, She Said Nothing, Amnesia (live), In The Light Of The Moon, Graceless Lady, Night Lighter, She Sells Sanctuary, New Eyes, Coming Home Pt III, Sister, Disintegration, Time Stands Still.

The Core Big Blood Thirteen Sun Playlist: Full Of Smoke, Indang Pariman, Under The Concourse, 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.

Spooky Ruin Playlist: Satie (First Gnossienne), A Hole In One, Don't Trust The Ruin, Don't Trust The Ruin II, Got Wings?, Something Brighter Than The News, Breath In A Seed, South Of Portland, Never Let Me Go, Sirens Knell, Everything Is Improving, Thumbnail Moon, Endless Echo, Micah's Old Room.

Temporarily Unfiled Mega Colleen: A Quiet Lousy Roar, Past Time, Vitamin C, Squeeze Box, The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven, No Gravity Blues, Dead Song, A Spiral Down, Creepin Crazy Time, Run, I Will Love You, Never Let Me Go, Water, The Queen and Her Court, Out Of Turn, Fight For Your Dinner, You Need Then It Comes, Twin Skin II, Away Pt III, Leviathan Song Pt II, Planet Caravan, ...But I Studied, Half Light Blues.

Loud Happy Caleb: Under The Concourse, Sovereignty You Bitch, Old Time Primitives, It's Alright.

Folk Colleen: Ballad Of The 13 Year Old, All Operations, Handsome Son of No One, Shrining Light, Haystack, Frost Farm, 'Preese 'Preese, Grin, Graceless Lady, Secret Garden, A Watery Down II.

Most Improved by Marijuana: A Quiet Lousy Roar, Indang Pariman, A Hole In One, Haystack, Squeeze Box, Polly + The Sheep, I Will Love You, Never Let Me Go, Old Time Primitives.

Songs by Other Artists

These are here for various reasons.

Timber Timbre - Grand Canyon (2014) Taylor Kirk's songwriting reminds me of Colleen's darker songs -- even his lyrics are Kinsellesque.

Get Well Soon - If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting (2008) If I pretend this is a Big Blood song, it's one of their best.

Yazoo - Winter Kills (1982) It's not nearly as heavy, but this is the only thing I've heard with the same spirit as Never Let Me Go.

Cocteau Twins - Pandora (1984) This song is the gold standard for beautiful multitrack vocals that aren't actual words.

Rex Holman - Come On Down (1970) An actor who made only one album, Rex Holman had psychedelic folk in his bones before the term was invented, and this is his greatest song.

Gravenhurst - Black Holes In The Sand (2004) Other than the vocals this really sounds like Big Blood.

The Lay Llamas - Archaic Revival (2014) Perfect psych drone.

Hawkwind - Infinity (1978) The song from my second favorite band that sounds most like my favorite band.

Camper Van Beethoven - Klondike (199?) The song from my third favorite band that sounds most like my favorite band.

Camper Van Beethoven - June (1989) One of the keys to my musical taste, and fiddler Don Lax was tapping into something really good.

R.E.M. - Belong (1991) The sonic textures in this song come closer than anything else to what I hear in Big Blood's most intensely happy songs.

R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction (1985) My favorite folk album that's not by my favorite band.

Led Zeppelin - The Battle of Evermore (1971) Of all the ways to merge folk and rock, the best is to take folk through the roof, and so far only Big Blood has done it as well as this.

Joanna Newsom - En Gallop (2004) My favorite vocal performance not by Colleen Kinsella. The title refers to the ONE-two rhythm, which Big Blood does too, but faster.

Silver Summit - Child (2012) This was probably influenced by Big Blood, because the band is from the same region and it sounds more like Colleen's heavy songs than anything else I can find.

Christina Carter - Second Death (2006) And Big Blood might have been influenced by this, because it sounds more like Colleen's dreamy songs than anything else I can find.

Neil Young - Love And Only Love (1990) If they ever cover a Neil Young song, it has to be this.

Blue Oyster Cult - Astronomy (live 1978) Years before Big Blood, this was my favorite heavy gothic song, and Sandy Pearlman's lyrics are weird in the same way as Colleen's.

David Bowie - After All (1970) Everything stylish and dark in the last 40 years has roots in this song.

Steve Mauldin - The Abominable O Holy Night (199?) When I mentioned wild beauty in bad music, I was thinking of this song. Mauldin was intentionally singing badly, but if he had tried to sing well with the same crazy energy, this would be even more awesome.