I loved Fire on Fire's The Orchard, so I was pretty disappointed to learn from a recent Michael Gira interview that they had dissolved. My despair turned out to be extremely short-lived though, as I've since discovered that Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been self-releasing a steady stream of slightly more feral and weird cassettes on their dontrusttheruin imprint ever since. Big Blood sometimes seems a little more sketchlike and rough than Fire on Fire, but the duo's backwoods brilliance remains intact and is generally enhanced by its underproduced and artfully artless nature.
dontrusttheruin/Phase!
The most significant difference between Fire on Fire and Big Blood is that Colleen Kinsella (or her alter-ego Asian Mae) is often the lead vocalist, which may very well be the best thing about the band.She certainly spent some time on the microphone with Fire on Fire, but usually in chorus with others and never quite this conspicuously ragged.Her wild and oft-discordantly harmonized singing is definitely a bit of an acquired taste, but it is one of the most important elements in Big Blood’s transcendence of the freak-folk ghetto: when Colleen is at her most unhinged, she sounds absolutely possessed or ecstatic (as on "The Grove is Hotter Than An Ocean's Oven").Caleb, for his part, is also no slouch in the crazily urgent vocal department.At their best, these two have a way of singing their simple songs with such discordant abandon that they achieve a devastating and primal perfection."In the Shade," in particular, is probably the most stomping, raucous, and pure piece of music that I will hear this year.Then again, there are also times when the duo just simply write and sing some good songs, like the languid and hazy "In The Light of the Moon."
The Grove, however, is not quite a start-to-finish classic–there is definitely some filler and Caleb and Colleen occasionally err on the side of shrillness or delve into overly reverbed slide-guitar blues.Reverb does not particularly suit Big Blood, as their songs don't work as well when stripped of their rawness and intimacy: this duo is great because they sound like hillbillies on the verge of the rapture, not because they churn out flawless folk rock melodies and hot blues licks.However, their rare abstract/experimental moments are also pretty rewarding, such as "Saints & Lepers," which collages a bittersweet banjo motif together with car horns, an ice cream truck, and a marching band in a remarkably effective way.I also enjoyed the Eastern-tinged lysergic weirdness of "Something Brighter Than the News" quite a bit–it was no coincidence that the duo collaborated with Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop back in their Cerberus Shoal days.
Despite the few missteps and less inspired pieces, The Grove is pretty much essential for anyone that can appreciate beauty in its most organic and unpolished form: Kinsella and Mulkerin have tapped into something quite remarkable and vital here.This album was originally released on cassette by the Greek label Phase! in 2008 before being re-released as a CDR on the band's own label, neither of which can be readily tracked down in physical form.Fortunately, however, Big Blood have helpfully posted this and all of their other out-of-print albums on WMFU's Free Music Archive.
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