The Blood Brothers - 'Young Machetes' (V2) Released 20/11/06

The Blood Brothers, five kids from Seattle whose penchant for throat-scraping screams, convulsive guitars and un-holy fractured imagery has long set them apart as beacons of avant-garde catharsis, have been holding a mirror up to the world and it’s hypocrisy, it’s insanity, for over five years now.

Recorded with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi fame, on first listen ‘Young Machetes’, whilst immediately visceral, exhausting and exhilarating, isn’t as drastic a leap from previous LP ‘Crimes’ as would have been hoped. The vocals still pierce, the lurching switches in pace still beggar belief (‘Laser Life’ for example begins it’s three-minute existence as a queasy electro-waltz and ends it a shrieking, albeit pretty, mess), but after a while even the most outré and sadistic of song structures can feel repetitive. Could this be the point The Blood Brothers become, heaven forbid, predictable?!

Like. ****. Listen closely and ‘Young Machetes’ soon unfurls itself into a matter of great importance; the stylistic shifts are uniformly successful while the lyrics, which have always been as humorous as they are scabrous, allow a sense of cohesion, not heard since 2002’s surreal ‘March On Electric Children’, to develop over the course of the record’s fifty-minutes and fifteen tracks. We wouldn’t go as far as to label ‘Young Machetes’ a concept album, but from the opening cries of “Fire! Fire! Fire!” that serve as both warning and rallying cry (and let’s face it, how can an album whose first track is called ‘Set Fire To The Face On Fire’ be anything but amazing), to the closing seconds of the Portishead-esque ‘Giant Swan’, ‘Young Machetes’ consumes itself with visions of apocalyptic pessimism and images that hold little respite.