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Big Blood, "Unlikely Mothers"
Sometimes I wonder why the rest of the world does not seem to appreciate the singular genius of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin like I do.  Other times, an album like this comes along and reminds me how truly unhinged, prickly, and unsuited for mass consumption the duo can be and everything makes sense once more.  Given the diversity and volume of Big Blood's output to date, it is hard to say just how dramatic a divergence Unlikely Mothers actually is, but I normally associate the band with a uniquely raw, primal, and art-damaged strain of folk that defies easy categorization.  Unlikely Mothers also defies easy categorization, but calls to mind some sort of primitive, sludgy, and bass-driven strain of '70s hard rock.  Some of the grooves achieve an unexpectedly hypnotic momentum or bracing, wild-eyed power, but the shrillness and single-mindedness of some these pieces can definitely make for a rough ride.
I have wrestled with what to say about this particular album for months, which I find very amusing given that Unlikely Mothers was probably composed and recorded in significantly less time than that.  I do not mean that as a critique, as Big Blood's intention very clearly seems to have been to unleash something loose, spontaneous, and different (and Unlikely Mothers is certainly all of those things).  What troubled me instead was that a band I love made an album that I found very hard to embrace, yet they themselves thought enough of it to make it one of their more high-profile, widely distributed albums (plenty of perfectly fine Big Blood albums have historically gone into the world as self-released cassettes or CDRs).  Consequently, I figured that I was probably missing something significant and just needed to hear the album enough to unlock its secrets.  Now that I have listened to it quite a lot, I can safely say that Unlikely Mothers probably has no secret layers or great buried melodies to uncover, but that it is nonetheless an admirable and unique experiment.  It just is not one for me.
With just a couple of exceptions, these nine songs are basically all grooves built upon a single promising riff.  Most of the riffs are admittedly cool ones, particularly the bass lines in "Steppin’ Time, Pt. II" and "Watery Down, Pt. II," but those riffs rarely make the leap from "great groove" to "great song," a problem compounded by some rather indulgent song lengths.  It takes quite an exceptional vamp to hold my attention for ten solid minutes and Big Blood are unlikely to dethrone Fela Kuti in that regard any time soon, though the 15-minute closer (the aforementioned "Watery Down, Pt. II") admittedly works quite well.  Still, if a bunch of simple, fuzzed-out bass riffs was all Unlikely Mothers had to offer, it would be fairly easy to dismiss.  It is not easy to dismiss at all, however.  Some of that success is certainly due to some neat details (the primal, clattering drums in "Thumbnail Moon," the lazy psychedelic guitar meandering in "Watery Down, Pt. II," etc.) and some occasional strong melodies and songcraft ("Watery Down" yet again).  Most of the album's success, however, is due to the duo's decidedly unique aesthetic.
Quite simply, Unlikely Mothers sounds like the work of some kind of isolated, backwoods cult that has largely spent the last few decades consuming massive amounts of peyote, reading arcane books, and listening to Sabbath and Dead Moon.  In fact, I suspect this album sounds far more like a weird backwoods cult than an actual weird backwoods cult would sound.  Caleb and Colleen have always sounded delightfully ragged, but Mothers takes that tendency and amplifies it to a raucous, stomping, religious fervor.  While there are a few oases of genuine beauty to be found in these songs, the emphasis is much more on trancelike repetition and frayed abandon (Kinsella often sounds more like a banshee than a Siren this time around).
The tragedy here is that I am perfectly fine with absolutely all of that: I am quite happy to follow Big Blood as far out on their weird, precarious limb as they want to go.  In fact, I think Unlikely Mothers is a legitimate stylistic triumph, as it all sounds genuinely fiery, gut-level, and half-crazed without a trace of irony, artifice, or artistic detachment to be found.  I love that.  I just wish that the duo's shriller, more unhinged tendencies had been better balanced with strong melodic hooks (Big Blood are historically very good at finding ways to present beautiful melodies with sharp edges).  The most perplexing thing of all is that at least some of these songs are reworkings of older pieces (both "Away" and "Leviathan Song" previously surfaced on Old Time Primitives, for example).  If cannibalizing pre-existing songs was fair game, it seems like Unlikely Mothers could have been forged from much stronger raw material than it was.  Perhaps these were all chosen for thematic reasons (the title refers to the fact that both Kinsella's mother and her aunt were nuns), but I was unable to find any kind of overarching narrative thread or theme in the songs as a listener.  Consequently, this album feel like an exasperating missed opportunity to me, albeit a wonderfully wild and divergent one.  A better album than this one can definitely be made in this vein.  That said, however, both halves of "Watery Down" rank comfortably among Big Blood's finest work, so apparently even a somewhat frustrating Big Blood album is still good for roughly 20 minutes of sublime greatness.
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