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 other heart of their sound is Caleb's style and sound engineering. In this podcast interview Colleen reveals that Caleb sees colors in sounds, and he does the recording and mixing like he's painting. There have not been many painters in history who could make a career of meticulous composition of raw strokes of intense colors, and it would have been too much for me if the drone rhythms, fuzz-folk instrumentation, and spacy background aura hadn't happened to match my personal taste. When I consider the odds against my favorite musical stylist being married to my favorite singer and lyricist, I wonder if I only like Colleen so much because Caleb drew my attention to her.

Certainly, if Song For Baltimore and Oh Country had a radically different sound, I would never have listened to Big Blood deeply enough to wrap my ears around A Quiet Lousy Roar or Don't Trust The Ruin or No Gravity Blues or Got Wings. Their music is so good and so original that the only way I can satisfy my urge for harder stuff is to listen to more Big Blood, and the well is so broad and deep that I'm still making new discoveries after almost two years of heavy listening. On top of everything else, they're both great songwriters who understand the creative process. In the interview Colleen explains that her lyrics are so slippery because "a word pins you down". Most of her best songs have bits that aren't even real words, and where they are, they're often 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. Scroll down if you want to listen to my 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, a structure somewhere between verse-chorus and chaos, 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. It's like how the best painters master illustration and conventional painting before they develop their own style, and it's evidence that all the crazy stuff she does later is done with focus and intention.

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, after a lot of listens, I wonder if this is 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 90 seconds of structureless medieval free-folk and another minute of rhythmic string plucking before the first verse. 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. It also sets a precedent for lyrics that we're not supposed to understand: "Old lady, we've (said player?) to all operations maintaining this (lane?)"

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. Sometimes I think Colleen sings best when she sings along with Caleb, and some of her own best songs are feeding on that energy.

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 wouldn't 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. Notice the very high notes and try to figure out what beat they come in on. And 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.

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 different the choruses are from the verses while still being in the same subgenre of music. I 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

This is another strong candidate for their best complete album. The opener, Glory Daze, is like a demonic circus song where Colleen sings like she's trying to break glass. A Hole In One is their first really gothic song, with dark looming vocals and harmonium 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, a cover of an even more obscure song by Alex Lukashevsky, is the most unusual song I've ever heard. It's not just experimental, but a fully realized composition in an alien genre.

Caleb has three brilliant songs in totally different styles. Don't Trust The Ruin is an epic dirge like a postapocalyptic journey through a haunted swamp. For a while I wondered why they named their record company after this mediocre minor song, but after enough listens, holy shit! The combined sound of their voices would make Cthulhu blush, and all of their darkest songs have their roots in this.

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. 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.

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 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). My crazy theory is that Song For Baltimore is about itself, a spiritual event that changes human consciousness, and that one line is crediting another song: the spirit risen in Sequins.



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 an international hit with Brand New Key. 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. They're like the moon and the sun, and Song For Baltimore is like the next generation of Melanie's cover of Ruby Tuesday, or 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 love this song is that it sounds like Rush, especially 2112. Listen to the pacing of Geddy Lee's vocals in The Temples Of Syrinx, or their intensity in Soliloquy. In the context of these more powerful singers, Colleen's voice is not breaking the wall I thought it was breaking when I first heard it; and when I played it for other people, they were not accurately describing why they couldn't stand it. On a scale of one to ten, it's not even a ten in being shrill or ear-splitting or any kind of noisy, but it's an eleven in being whimsical.

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 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.

So Po Swing is foot-tapping cartoon bluegrass with a long hypnotic finish. And Caleb's great song is Got Wings? At first I thought it was terrible, and then I thought it sounded like Tom Waits. Is it blasphemy to say it's not only better than Tom Waits, but better than Captain Beefheart?

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 Colleen's 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 I love the part where the vocals join the guitar solo.

No Gravity Blues is the best minimalist song possible, with 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 aliens, and 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 (a-ooo a-ooooooooo) 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 line 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 echo 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, Colleen's dark sun. (It also oddly reminds me of the Doctor Who theme.) 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, and this is one of five Big Blood songs (The Rise of Quinnisa Rose, Song For Baltimore, Oh Country, Destin Rain) that blew me away on the first listen. 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 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. But what is the crime?

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, and almost forms a bridge between Don't Trust The Ruin and Endless Echo.

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 Out Of Turn is a dark song with some heavy lead guitar.

Away part I and part II and Leviathan Song part I will reappear with higher numbers on Unlikely Mothers, so I assumed these were early drafts. But in this video from their European tour in 2011, Away already sounds like the 2014 version. So I'm guessing 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. At first I only liked the highest numbered versions but now I'm leaning toward the lowest numbered, because they're simpler and weirder.

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 unveils a new high throaty vocal sound, and in Twin Skin II it blends into a 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 -- It's Alright would be one of the best songs on Ragged Glory. Endless Echo is colder, sharper, and even heavier -- no song is more improved by playing 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. Compare it to Low Gravity Blues, which is more raw and funky but not as powerful. 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, almost like a mirror image of the tone change in Squeeze Box.

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 fits well 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 listening to it right before going to sleep, I've spent more minutes listening to this one song than almost any artist's entire work. 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. The chorus is twelve perfect syllables: "We owe the night a dream / The tomb I lay upon." It doesn't rhyme in the usual way, but say the two lines and notice the similarity of the mouth movements.

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 sounds like a wedding song from mystical ancient Scotland, but the lyrics are more like a funeral. It's unusual for getting noisy all at once instead of gradually, and my favorite bit is where, right after it gets noisy, she sings "suffer".

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. This is 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 more metallic than they've ever been, and I'm curious to see if this style thread continues.

Playlists

I've spent a lot of time play-testing different combinations of songs and this version finally feels barely adequate, but it's not finished. My rules are: 1) Each list is chronological unless there's a reordering that's clearly better. 2) No song may appear on multiple lists except with the final list. 3) I don't have to make a place for every great song.

Introduction to Big Blood: She Said Nothing, Amnesia (live), In The Light Of The Moon, Graceless Lady, The Birds & The Herds, Breath In A Seed, A Spiral Down, Run, The Queen and Her Court, Sister, Old Time Primitives, Time Stands Still.

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun: Full Of Smoke, Indang Pariman, Hangman, Adversaries & Enemies, The Rise of Quinnisa Rose, Song For Baltimore, Oh Country, Destin Rain, Sick With Information, Go See Boats, Magnetic Green, A Watery Down II.

Trust The Ruin: Don't Trust The Ruin, Vitamin C, Don't Trust The Ruin II, Got Wings?, Something Brighter Than The News, South Of Portland, I Will Love You, Sirens Knell, Everything Is Improving, Thumbnail Moon, Endless Echo.

Dark Cathedral: Past Time, Satie (First Gnossienne), A Hole In One, No Gravity Blues, Creepin Crazy Time, Never Let Me Go, Water, You Need Then It Comes.

Folk Of Increasing Weirdness: Ballad Of The 13 Year Old, All Operations, Handsome Son of No One, Haystack, 'Lectric 'Lashes 2, Secret Garden, ...But I Studied.

Most Improved by Marijuana: A Quiet Lousy Roar, Indang Pariman, A Hole In One, Sequins, Haystack, Got Wings?, Squeeze Box, Polly + The Sheep, South Of Portland, I Will Love You, Old Time Primitives, You Need Then It Comes, Thumbnail Moon, Twin Skin II.

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 fourth or fifth 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.