The Blood Brothers are usually described as post-hardcore, but their gear
is, really, pure poetry. The wedded wails of twin bansheeist vocalists
Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie are oft thought of as instruments —
musical weapons more tonal than lyrical — that merely match the bashed pianos and colliding guitars and splitting skins of their rabble-rousing racket.
But there's little doubt — especially by now, on this, their almighty
(mightiest?) fifth disc — that the Brothers' screeched screeds are dexterous
texts worthy of being studied and discussed over entire tertiary semesters.
Beholden to a dream-logic that turns the random and abstracted into the
recurring and symbolic, Whitney and Blilie have authored an ongoing series
of surrealist scenes in which the imagery of dreams depicts America as
dystopian nightmare. It's reminiscent of Dali in the way it associates sex with
putrescence, and sees time as state of constant decay, yet shares the
absurdist comic sensibility of David Foster Wallace; their Home of the Slave
is a monster of televangelized platitudes and destructive therapy sessions
stitched together with surgical deformation. The band's bloodied nation rots from the head down, a rotten polity populated by television viewers grown bloated from a steady diet of televised nothing; all witnesses to an empty parade of flashy flesh, a Skin Army marching onwards towards excess, clamoring for fame and name, treading on any standing in their way.
They used to do this from symbolist distance, their first three albums — This
Adultery Is Ripe, March On Electric Children and …Burn, Piano Island, Burn —
finding the Blood Brothers concentrically circling a remote isle populated
by pineapple-skinned savages, their recurrent "Piano Island" the microcosm
for their own nation's macrocosm. But after setting it alight back in the
ought-three, they've since set their sights on rendering their America as
big and ugly as it truly is in this third millennium, 2004's Crimes finding them (openly) charting their nation as ambulant rubbish-barge, concentrically
circled by seagulls, their land-at-war a man-of-war leaving a trail of waste
in its wake as it lays waste to those in the way of these new Feudalists.
On Young Machetes, this encroaching and engulfing Empire ("the kingdom of
heaven reeks of burning witches and dust") has become as decadent as the
Rome of yore, their warships like gilded giant swans swanning into
foreign ports, the war machine a "Huge Gold AK-47!" whose bedazzled opulence
announces "we'll take what the fuck we want!." Yet Whitney finds the most
effective imagery amidst the record's centerpiece "Lift the Veil, Kiss the
Tank," when, as a soldier popping pills to "kill with no remorse, with no
recourse, dance on your conscience until it's a corpse," he decries the
marketing machine of war, that dares sell futile battle as patriotic valor
to the voters back home. Whilst its pair of strangely anthemic refrains —
"War never ends/ War never begins" and "But death's just death no matter how
you dress it up" — may lack the romantic abstraction of chorus-cries like
"Vegas, you're my dream unicorn" or "we all eat black clouds," they give
the album a sense of exigent directness, a thematic hook on which to hang
their helmet. And, from there, you can trace the choruses through their
cries of "Young machetes in lingerie charm us all into a frenzy," back to
"Camouflage, Camouflage"'s closing couplet "I couldn't see the skeletal
lightning/ It was camouflaged as a young machete," back to "We Ride Skeletal
Lightning," in which the image of a "sanitized exploding aeroplane" ticks
like a bomb about to go off.
It's, befitting such, an explosive disc, a
monumental rock-'n'-roll album that, in spite of its lyrical hilariousness
("He wrote a play and you're the protagonist/ All the girls you wished you'd
fucked make a guest appearance"), trades in an almost scandalous artistic
seriousness; it's a study of a generation whose restless complexity begs a
generation's study.
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