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. His dense layers of raw strokes of intense colors might have been too much for me, if my personal taste hadn't already been tuned to Big Blood's piercing vocals, drone rhythms, fuzz-folk instrumentation, and spacy background aura.
Even then, at first I only heard about 30 songs that I wanted to keep listening to. Now I'm up to 130, but it has been a long process of craving harder stuff and not finding it anywhere except by listening to more Big Blood. I only discovered them in summer of 2014, and since I started this page in spring of 2015, I've been in a compelling feedback loop: listening closely, coming here to put the music into words, and then using those words to guide my next round of listening, which continues to correct my understanding, "unknowingly incomplete".
[Change log. July 15, 2016: interpreted Haystack. 7/3: theory of musical entropy on Got Wings. 6/23: filled out Strange Maine 2 and rewrote Double Days 1. 5/30: changed page title. 5/28: completely rewrote and expanded Unlikely Mothers.]
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, this is one of their best complete albums, with consistently high quality across a lot 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, but only after a long intro. In a clear statement to listeners, the first 90 seconds of their first album is a medieval lilt jam that sounds like getting lost in a fairy forest.
All Operations also sets a precedent for lyrics that we're not supposed to understand. In the interview Colleen explains that her lyrics are so slippery because "a word pins you down," and I didn't really get this until I spent some time on Picbreeder. The secret of creativity is to use ideas as doorways to better ideas, and not to get stuck in them. Later in their career Big Blood will give us a deeper look at their creative process by releasing multiple evolutionary steps of some songs.
A Quiet Lousy Roar is one of their most challenging songs: backed only by percussion, Colleen squeaks nonsense and finally explodes in a glimmery cacophony. Listening to her voice as an instrument, at first it sounded bad to me and now it sounds great, but I wouldn't have given it a chance if not for her prettier voices.
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 is a great example with a catchy chorus and a timeless vibe.
And Slumber Me is Colleen's first organ song (I still struggle to hear the difference between accordion and harmonium). It's long and slow, with a sleepy sound that fits the title, and leaning toward a darkness that will continue to develop.
Strange Maine 1.20.07
With all its crazy variety, their first album is still a serious portfolio of their musical range, and instead of settling down, they followed it up with a full-on experimental album, pushing the edges of their sound and bringing in more influences. With the opener, a cover of Erik Satie's First Gnossienne, they're practicing melodies that are less folky and more sophisticated. Where other recordings like this one are sad and beautiful, Big Blood's translation is eerie and gothic. Notice the very high notes and try to figure out what beat they come in on. At the end it bleeds into Suffer Creation, an experiment in multilayer vocals that sounds like water sprites joined by a frog.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. If you make it to Unlikely Mothers, compare Under The Concourse and Sovereignty You Bitch to It's Alright and Endless Echo.
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 the previous song, and their greatness as a band comes from their ability to integrate these two forces, the sky and the earth.
My big 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 much happier than anything they've done before. In learning the language of Colleen's voice, this song was my gateway from Song For Baltimore to A Quiet Lousy Roar.
The Fall of Quinnisa Rose has Caleb's most beautiful falsetto vocals. And A Goddamn Spell is the most challenging song on the album, as Colleen's early folk sound tries on a closetful of weirdness. The scratch guitar makes it seem like a secret tunnel from Slumber Me to The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven.
Space Gallery Jan. 27, 2007 Sahara Club Jan. 28, 2007
Another good complete album. They do three songs each, starting with their strongest and ending with their darkest, and then a cover. In Colleen's opener, Glory Daze, she sings like a demonic circus performer trying to break glass. Shrining Light is a fluttery folk song that for me is the only dud, but it's the album's biggest hit on YouTube. A Hole In One is their first really gothic song, with dark looming vocals and harmonium like a mournful church organ.Sequins, a cover of an even more obscure song by Alex Lukashevsky, is the most unusual thing I've ever heard. If Colleen's folk songs are like a journey through a fairy forest, then Sequins is a fairy robot forest on Gamma Velorum 9. It's not just experimental, but a fully realized performance in a mystery orphan genre.
Caleb owns this album, with three brilliant songs in different styles. Don't Trust The Ruin is an epic noise dirge like a postapocalyptic journey through a haunted swamp. For a while I wondered why they named their record company after this minor song, but after more listening, the combined sound of their voices would make Cthulhu blush, and this is a landmark in their musical story, the seed of all of Caleb's darker songs.
She Said Nothing is one of the best straight folk songs of all time, and I can hear Colleen's influence in Caleb's heady lyrics and punctuated singing style. And The Rise of Quinnisa Rose would be my religion if it weren't for Song For Baltimore. A great happy song is harder than a great dark song, and 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 psychedelic yodeling 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)
Until now Colleen has been working around the edges of perfect musical happiness, bumping against it with Glory Daze and Shrining Light, and climbing the wall with the help of two covers, Indang Pariman and Sequins, and her backup on The Rise of Quinnisa Rose. Now it all comes together in Adversaries & Enemies, an explosion of pure bliss that anticipates the supernova at the end of the album. Here's a live version by Fire On Fire. "Pressure wash this sacred surface."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. It makes me want them to cover Boney M's Rasputin.
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. Listen for the bell ringing at the peak of the song.
Song For Baltimore is my personal lord and savior. 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. The verses are like electrocution by whimsy, and the choruses rise to rivers of lightning that get brighter and brighter 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).
Where did this song even come from? At first it seemed without precedent, but now that Song For Baltimore is part of me, I hear a bit of it in everything. R.E.M.'s Wendell Gee has similar banjo picking and the same otherworldly vibe. Rush's Anthem shares its epic quavery vocals, nested threefold structure, and meaning of life theme. And its clearest ancestor is Melanie Safka. Overall Colleen's voice is weirder and darker, with a wider range in every dimension, but Melanie's voice has the same edge while being stronger and warmer. They're like the sun and the moon, 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.
Sew Your Wild Days Tour Vol. II (2007)
Haystack is a long folk song as intricate as a spiderweb and as impulsive as the wind. For a long time I couldn't get a grip on anything but the choruses, but now I don't even hear verses and choruses, just one long unfolding of disarray in which the most normal bit is repeated. Oddly it reminds me of Big Star's third album -- after I understood Haystack I suddenly understood Kangaroo.Adding to the mystery, the song's full name is "Haystack (A.P.)" Astral Projection? Angina Pectoris? My crazy theory is that AP is Applied Physics and the song is about surviving entropy. Freeman Dyson has said that the universe will never experience heat death, because life can always keep adapting to lower energy even when the stars have burned out. "There are so many ways in which to feel the sun," and the song is about facing loss and chaos as we get older.
But probably it's about weed: "late night, flashing light, smell of smoke... we've got grace, time slows down." More specifically it's about using cannabis to recover from the difficulty of life by experiencing the divine in everything: "so many ways in which to feel the sun," and then you hear the smoke being exhaled. Right before the first chorus is a line I'm going to etch into my grinder: "A mossy green carpet to swallow driven thoughts."
This album's other great song, Got Wings?, sounds even more like a demented hillbilly devil cult than Big Blood usually does. I want to say it sounds like Tom Waits but in some ways it's even more concentrated, and it shows their ongoing ambition to make their sound louder but no less raw.
Why does the term "folk metal" always refer to music that starts at metal and moves toward folk, and not the other way around? I think it's because metal exists on a higher level of energy. Energy is not the same as quality, but music of a given quality can drop in energy, or add lower-energy elements, while easily keeping its balance. Moving to a higher energy level is much more difficult, and even great bands like R.E.M. have tried and failed.
Three absolute triumphs, all going from folk to something extremely heavy in the space of one song, are Led Zeppelin's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, Hawkwind's Space Is Deep, and Song For Baltimore. Notice how different they are. Even hard rock songs by artists with folk backgrounds, like Bowie's The Width of a Circle or 10,000 Maniacs' My Mother The War, have unique sounds. This is why there can never be a folk-to-metal genre, because adding noise without losing beauty means riding a wave of chaos that could end up anywhere. Everything that rises must diverge.
Reversing musical entropy is not something Big Blood got inspired and did one time. It's something they've done so consistently that it must be part of their practice. Got Wings, in its own way, is more metal than anything they've done before, and that elevator is only on the second floor and still rising. And in a few months, The Grove will start up a whole other tower.
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. Lyrics sites have the line "And amnesia was forgetting", but I'm pretty sure it's "An amnesia worth forgetting".
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."
Colleen's great 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. "Does a man seek his own face for the flaws in shadows beneath?" 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 become a big part of Colleen's sound, so I think of this as a boundary marker, with the verses looking backward and the choruses looking forward.
The Grove (2008)
This was probably recorded before The Orchard, which would make the Squeeze Box vocals an evolution from The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven. This is the first time Colleen's voice has been both this strong and this dark, with this much edge on both the low and high notes. The lyrics are 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. One way I judge a song is, when it comes on the stereo, how strongly am I compelled to crank the volume and kneel before the speakers? Among all recorded music, the kneel factor of No Gravity Blues is second only to Song For Baltimore, and if it came on the car stereo I would have to shut it off or pull over.
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, which in turn will inspire Colleen's greatest heavy song, Away Pt III. And Something Brighter Than The News takes the eerie vibe of No Gravity Blues and adds 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. Like The Rise of Quinnisa Rose, Oh Country is a rare example of three-time drone. 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 it's 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. This was the first Big Blood song I heard, and it's a good choice to introduce a random person to their sound.
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)
I suggest listening to Radio Valkyrie first, and if you like it, this is 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 clear lyrics and relatively simple backing music, as if the words were written in a notebook and then the songs were built around them.Dead Song is a total success in rocking out. If Big Blood were a classic rock band this would be the one you'd hear on the radio, and it's my favorite song by anyone to sing. The lyrics seem to be about the dead waiting to reincarnate, or about listening to ancestors. "Remember the chills before being."
A Spiral Down is another tight song with great vocals. New Eyes is a deep whispery song that gains depth with more listens. And 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 a new evolutionary level in noise. 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 incredibly Destin Rain is even more whimsical, with 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 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)
This is Big Blood's most popular album, but it sounds to me like they're polishing old ideas more than coming up with new ones. The prettiest song is Coming Home Pt III, and the most interesting songs are the first two:Oh My Child starts with just Colleen's voice, gradually joined by an electronic sound that will later anchor the Radio Valkyrie album. When I plugged a bunch of Big Blood songs into Shazam, I discovered that Oh My Child was sampled by a German rap duo in this track.
And my big favorite is Creepin Crazy Time, which takes the heavier sound from The Grove Is Hotter and Dead Song (and the songwriting from Talking Head Pt I) and amps it up into full-on psych rock.
Big Blood & The Wicked Hex (2011)
It's said that nobody has two revolutions in them: after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he wrote Macbeth, not Waiting For Godot. So maybe one day I'll hear something and say, "Oh, there's where Wicked Hex came from." Because it seems impossible that they could strip their sound down to nothing and build it up so suddenly into something so good. 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. The song is Run, and I can't say 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 cover my favorite song when I was 13, Blondie's Heart of Glass, in a swampy voodoo style, but here they cover the style of Heart of Glass, feeding its hypnotic bass echo through a deep sludge filter with razor wire vocals, and the result is the most gothic thing I've ever heard. Listen to Heart of Glass from 2:30-2:45 and Never Let Me Go from 2:45-3:50 and you might understand why I love this band so much: every influence they take, they sound so primal and concentrated that it's like the original artist was blandly copying Big Blood. That part and the part from 4:50-6:10 are the meat of the song, and the three choruses are the shiny black wrapping. The sound also reminds me of Alison Moyet's Winter Kills, and oddly the Doctor Who theme.
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, or it could be the battle song of the space funk invasion. I can't even tell whose song it is -- Colleen sings lead but the underlying structure is more like Caleb.
Keening is nine minutes of structureless big-throated high vocals over electronic noise. I don't really like it, but I recognize it as a musical breakthrough that will later be refined in A Watery Down I and But I Studied.
If any song is objectively Colleen's greatest performance, it's Water, 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 as the waves swell. This is what songs in David Lynch movies are trying to be. I have to remind myself that this sound was made by humans. I think it's extremely sad, but I'm not sure -- after she sings "the water will come," is that deeper sadness or the sound of the water coming?
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 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 an evolution from the Wicked Hex sound, with chords and vocal soloing like Water, in a verse-chorus structure with an insistent slow rhythm like Run, but they're moving back toward folk, and I love how the sounds come together at the end of each chorus. 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)
Old Time Primitives is Big Blood's grooviest and most danceable song, and my favorite where I can't hear Colleen's voice (but there is a "mystery singer"). Caleb's other songs are very doomy, and the best is Sirens Knell, which sounds like an orc anthem, and is an important step in their evolution toward epic noise.I'm guessing that Out Of Turn is an outtake from Wicked Hex, because it's the only song on this album with that sound, and the blistering lead guitar shows that they're trying to push it louder.
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 parts I and II are experimental variations on the live version, and maybe they were looking for stuff to add to the eventual part III. But Leviathian Song Pt I sounds like the raw song that they would later fill out into Part II.
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 is like the definition of psychedelic folk. Usually I can understand a Big Blood song starting with the voices, but for this one I had to start with the music and then hear the vocal track as part of it. I love this line: "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 place where Big Blood 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 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.Sick With Information is like a happy campfire song about human extinction, and I think it's the best they've sung together in years.
You Need Then It Comes took me a 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 a mysterious high instrument complementing harmonium and dense, tight electric guitar that bursts in and out of silence. Even though it came before Unlikely Mothers, it seems to be looking beyond it, and I would love to hear a whole album like this.
In Twin Skin I and II, Colleen continues to explore the vocal style from Keening, and in Twin Skin II it blends into a celestial soundscape like robot church music, the most radical song on the album. The evolution of this voice will continue on the two Watery Downs on Unlikely Mothers.
Unlikely Mothers (2014)
This is Big Blood's least experimental album. They knew exactly what they were doing, which is why they made all nine songs over seven minutes and released it on double colored vinyl through Blackest Rainbow. According to that page, "The record was recorded after Colleen spent a lot of time listening to Sabbath, Zepp and Dead Moon," as if those artists made them decide on a whim to sound like this. Unlikely Mothers is their crowning achievement, every thread of their musical history focused to a point and exploding like a bomb, and they listened to that stuff to make sure they got it right. It remains unpopular among their fans, and it took me a year of listening to their whole discography to put the album in the right context to appreciate it. I assume that all 400 copies were bought by time travelers from the future.They didn't just listen to Zeppelin to rock out better. The opening track, A Watery Down I, is saturated with an Egyptian goddess vibe that sounds a lot like the intro to In The Light, and also like Koji Kondo's Spirit Temple. To hear what they've added to their sound in seven years, compare it to Slumber Me.
Unlikely Mothers has four sides, and on side A, after the intro, Colleen and Caleb each play their most normal song. Away Pt III is thundering psych rock, merging the skull-cracking vocals of Glory Daze, the rambling looseness of Low Gravity Blues, the dark power of Creepin Crazy Time, and the hypnotic riffing of Run. Other than Bob Dylan's Idiot Wind, no song makes me want to sing along more than Away Pt III. If I were a UFC fighter this would be my walkout song. Imagine hearing it on the Apocalypse Now soundtrack.
The best way to approach It's Alright is through Neil Young's music with Crazy Horse, like Love And Only Love from Ragged Glory. This is both louder and more densely compacted, like Neil Young backed by demons, and Caleb is only getting started.
Leviathan Song Pt II is another evolution from Never Let Me Go, but where The Queen and Her Court lightened the sound, this is just as dark and more stately, with a sharp second guitar track and Colleen really working the low notes. At the end of the song the tone switches from dark to bright, almost like a mirror image of the change in Squeeze Box. "A cycle, a circle."
Thumbnail Moon is nine minutes of industrial sludge, like a powwow of alien cavemen, with awesome doom lyrics. The clearest precedent is Got Wings, a song that was still emerging from the cracked shell of folk. These are the two muddiest songs in the lineage that leads to Endless Echo.
Side C is the voodoo side. Steppin' Time Pt II is like the Wicked Hex sound turned into something more funky and filthy. That link is a live performance that sounds best on computer speakers. And So Po Village Stone is the Radio Valkyrie sound dragged through hot tar.
Side D has the two best songs. Endless Echo sounds like two evil wizards battling at the end of time, but I didn't feel its power until I did two things. The second was to play it loud, and eventually I bought a more powerful stereo mainly to hear this one song louder. And the first thing was to study its ancestry. The sound goes at least as far back as the shock-shriek peak of Cerberus Shoal's Baby Gal, and in the Big Blood years it goes back to Don't Trust The Ruin. That song's vocals are the pure divine light of hippie Satan, nothing can touch them, but it should be possible to put similar vocals to much more powerful music, and I imagine they were patiently circling that goal for seven years. South of Portland packed the sound tighter, I Will Love You unpacked it into noisy chaos, Sirens Knell made a full epic template, You Need Then It Comes cleaned and focused it, and Endless Echo brings it all together, Big Blood's dark sun. "So beautiful through a broken piece of glass."
A Watery Down II is like the vocals from Twin Skin II, backed up by lilting phase guitar like Radio Valkyrie, with a strong heartbeat like Wicked Hex -- but the combined effect is completely original, a new genre like space lounge music. The leisurely, evolving verses come back five times to the same chorus, and the whole thing stretches out to more than 15 minutes and is over too soon. Big Blood's longest song is also the one I listen to most often. It's like the happy fade-out music for reality itself, and with lyrical references to gravity and downward motion, I think the song (like David Abram's book Becoming Animal) views gravity as the love of the earth to which all things return. The chorus has one of those lines that baffles my rational mind but feels profound: We owe the night a dream.
Double Days I (2015)
Their music has always had a bit of electronics, but on Radio Valkyrie and Fight For Your Dinner these sounds began shifting from the back toward the front, and now they have arrived. It sounds like they got a good analog synth and did some serious woodshedding before recording this. The opener, On Waterfall's Head, is just Colleen's voice and one keyboard track. Then Rabbit's Foot stacks up the layers into something that sounds like cotton candy robot funk.At the core of the album are two covers, a stunning interpretation of Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan, and a sleepy, slow-building cover of The Cure's Disintegration, which might have the album's only guitar. The crazy thing is, on this home-recorded album, both surpass the originals in the precision and depth of the sound engineering.
Between those, the near-instrumental For Gardiner Greene Hubbard is the most sci-fi they've ever been. And the best song is the mysteriously titled ...But I Studied. It's like an evolution from Shadows for the Land and A Watery Down I, but more spare and melodic, and pushing farther into the unknown. My guess about the title is that they were having fun on this album, but on this song they were trying to challenge themselves. And if that's where they're headed, then I'm excited to hear a whole album that sounds like Radio Valkyrie in space.
Double Days II (2015)
Their most consistently happy album adds layers of elegance to their early folk vibe. Compare New Plan from this album with She Wander(er) from Dark Country Magic: the 2010 sound was loose and watery, and the 2015 sound is tight and airy. And to keep themselves from getting accidentally popular, or to remind us what kind of band they are, every major song has radio-unfriendly weird sounds at the end.Did Caleb have any pretty songs between Night Lighter in 2008 and Sick With Information in 2014? Now he has two more, Endless Peace and Magnetic Green. 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 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".
And Go See Boats is a perfect arrangement of top-grade ear candy, as beautifully polished as their early stuff is beautifully raw. 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, metallic, catchy song: Half Light Blues. If Kurt Cobain were alive he would cover this.Playlists
Because their whole albums are so difficult, I approached Big Blood through songs, and this section is the result of many cannabis-aided playtests and revisions. It's not finished, and my latest tinkering is with the new Watery Down playlist. My rules are: 1) Each list is chronological unless there's a good reason to change it. 2) No song may appear on multiple lists. 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, She Wander(er), Run, The Queen and Her Court, Sister, 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, Sick With Information, Go See Boats, Magnetic Green.A Watery Down: A Watery Down I, Past Time, Sequins, Haystack, Destin Rain, Water, A Watery Down II.
Dark Cathedral: A Hole In One, Vitamin C, The Grove Is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven, No Gravity Blues, Creepin Crazy Time, Never Let Me Go, Leviathan Song Pt II, You Need Then It Comes.
Trust The Ruin: Don't Trust The Ruin, Don't Trust The Ruin II, Got Wings?, South Of Portland, I Will Love You, Sirens Knell, Everything Is Improving, Thumbnail Moon, Away Pt III, Endless Echo.
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.
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.
John Matthias - Pre-Loved / Vintage (2014) This doesn't sound like anything, but it's arguably folk, it's super-obscure, and I absolutely love it.
The Lay Llamas - Archaic Revival (2014) Perfect psych drone.
Hawkwind - Infinity (1978) A song from my second favorite band that sounds a lot like my favorite band.
Camper Van Beethoven - Klondike (199?) A song from my third or fourth favorite band that sounds a lot 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.
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 sounds more like Colleen's heavy songs than anything else I can find, but it sounds even more like Ex Reverie.
Christina Carter - Second Death (2006) And this sounds more like Colleen's dreamy songs than anything else I can find, except this...
Hop Along, Queen Ansleis - Organ Song (2005) This is the only song by anyone that you could put on a Big Blood album and nobody would guess it wasn't them, and it predates them! Frances Quinlan never did anything else like it, but given what Colleen did with this sound, there was no point.
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.