Seeing as it is in style for "scene" bands to be breaking up like it's going out of style (see what I did there? fucking scenesters...), it would be most fashionable of me (or would it?) to address the unfortunate losses the "scene" has suffered recently.
Unable to cope with the sheer mediocrity of their existence, The Early November decided to call it quits. That last triple-disc effort was hardly even that––really, they put effort into that? THAT. Repetition of the same word in a sentence irritates me. TEN put on a façade of being over-ambitious with their triple disc release, The Mother, The Mechanic, and The Path, but it took very little for me to see past the framing "concept" of the three discs and recognize what the album really is: a contrived piece of crap. Oh Ace Enders, your childhood was difficult. Your parents only took you to Olive Garden once every two weeks, while the rest of your suburban New Jersey (isn't all of New Jersey a suburb?) friends went every week. Mommy, Mommy, Jimmy got a Super Nintendo, why can't I? Thankfully, Ace Enders already has a solo project in place to continue the strain of mediocrity. The overlord of contrived "scene" mediocrity, Tom Delonge, has even invited Enders to go on tour.
Moving on to another band of contrived assholes, Matchbook Romance has disbanded. Ha, sort of a pun. Yet not. Nothing relating to MBR is clever. Apparently, they ran out of musical styles to latch onto and mimic (poorly) and were thus forced to call it quits. Each album was just a muffled echo of musical fads that reached their peak six months prior: West for Wishing latched onto the sing/scream post-hardcore trend a few Warped Tours too late, Stories and Alibis is a poor man's rendition of pop-punk in the vein of Fallout Boy, and Voices (the greatest travesty of all) has the audacity to mimic the progressive and off-kilter strides of Brand New, Thrice, and any asshole who downloaded a few tracks from Kid A and felt "inspired." I hope the corpse of Matchbook Romance rots while fertilizing the ground surrounding it, providing fresh crops to those who are hungry.
Also Pisolita and a few other jerkwad bands broke up, remember? Ha, me neither. Seeing as I am growing weary of talking about mediocre bands who have broken up, I will get to my main point: The Blood Brothers. Such an unfortunate loss. Moreover, an unfortunate loss for me personally, because I only started to get into them a few months ago. Yes, they certainly have been making music for 10 years and I could have gotten with the fucking program long ago, but it's a little late to go searching for your lost hamster now, isn't it?!
Call them what you will (I've heard them referred to as "art punk," "avant-garde post-hardcore," and "experimental hardcore") in an attempt to claim ownership of them ("Oh, I'm really into art punk lately. The Blood Brothers are like my faves..hehe"), but I doubt many have even scratched the surface of this band's complexity and sheer genius. Johnny Whitney's high-pitched screams are what that bumbling intern of a singer from Billy Talent wishes he could ascend to (pitch-wise and talent-wise).
Lyrically, the Brothers reach a healthy balance of surrealism and kitsch that causes you to ironically smirk as you ponder the benefits of doing psychoactive drugs. A fine example of this is on the track "Huge Gold AK-47." To begin with, the song's title alone jumps at you, creeps its way through your nostrils and attacks your brain, tickling it repeatedly (I realize that this appears to be a cocaine analogy, especially after my comment about psychoactive drugs, but you must consider the following:
- Cocaine does not tickle your brain, it grabs your brain and twists it, socking one to your central nervous system
- Cocaine is not a psychoactive drug
- I did not realize the parallels between my ingestion of "Huge Gold AK-47" and the most popular form of cocaine ingestion [you can also smoke it, inject it, even chew the coca leaves] until after writing this blog and reading it over
- I do admit that similarly to cocaine, the Blood Brothers can be addictive and cause a certain sense of euphoria, but they do not increase your blood pressure or cause long-term health risks
Done and done. Now back to the blog...) causing different thought processes to mingle, entangle, struggle, become one. Yes, the song is about war with imperialist implications in one sense, but the title is somewhat farcical, it creates a caricature of war. Lyrics range from surreal (yet still straightforward), "Those decadent war swans/With faces half drawn/Slinging blood-soaked carols at the slave ship sun," to comically over the top, "Huge gold Ak-47! Huge gold AK-47!/C'mon, it's 4 am, kick down the gate/And spray your ammo like champagne." By creating this type of caricature, we can actually take the song more seriously if we would like to. There are far too many songs about war that really are poor attempts to be intellectual and save the world (Green Day, anyone?), but do not actually represent anything true to the issue. Instead, they are the insensitive and uninformed ramblings of white suburbanites. In the case of "Huge Gold AK-47," it can exist in its own realm. Initially the entire song can be looked at as a far-fetched song about some sort of otherworldly war, done so in a kitschy manner (think of that movie Stargate). This allows one to separate the song from the endless catalog of war songs and then begin to look at it autonomously when one realizes that there is more to it than bizarre imagery and some whimsical repetition. It is only then that you can appreciate the genius of the lyrics:
Oh, there's a field inside your face
With breezes sweet as chardonnay
Violins dangling from willow branches
But the soldiers stripped it from your skin
Cracked its ribs in the kitchen
Dressed it in drag and pissed on every inch
On top of all this, the music just sounds fucking cool. Fast-paced, powerful, repetitive in a call-to-arms kind of way. It's music you can listen to on the subway and find yourself nodding your head, then moving your shoulders to and fro, then really nodding your head spastically, open palms banging your knees along with the beat, then in a flurry of self-consciousness realizing that you appear to other passengers to be having a seizure and thinking "perhaps I should tone it down a bit, they keep looking at me from the corners of their eyes," but then not giving a damn and continuing. Fuckers.
