You haven’t heard any music that sounds very much like
that of Austin, Texas trio Bloody Knives. At least, I haven’t heard anything—with the
exception to some extent of earlier material by the band—that sounds much like
the six short tracks on the band’s vinyl-only EP Death, recently released on Saint Marie
Records. How often do we honestly get to say that a band or recording is truly
that distinctive?
This is intense, pummeling, unsettling music, sometimes
featuring sharp, startling turns and contrasts. A formidable surge of synthetic
industrial sound is underpinned and propelled by classic, riveting punk
drumming, with smooth, clear, almost crystalline vocals hovering above. These
are components that “shouldn’t” work together and one might almost say couldn’t possibly work together as well
as they do here.
Find also in this admixture touches of spacerock, a
shoegaze appreciation for complexity of texture (the sound is super-fuzzy),
dazzling runs of what sound like vintage prog keyboard leads, washes of noise,
and a few interludes of abstract ambient beauty. An Austin outlet described the
band’s sound as “rock/stoner metal/psychedelic”[1] and the metal connection has come up elsewhere as well, remarkably so given that
the band works without guitars. How ever one might identify the various
elements, they come together into a unique, eerie, compelling whole that can’t
adequately be communicated by summing up its parts.
Lyrics and thematic content are as darkly intense as the
sonic experience and are consistent with the mercilessness of the band name and
the stark album title. Every track is a vignette in which a few brief phrases
are repeated in an incantatory manner to evoke the viewpoint of a different,
historically actual serial killer. Song names include “Waiting For You to Die,”
“Kill You All,” and “Bullet in Your Head.”
One could easily expect music with such thrash, drive,
and horrific themes to be topped off with vocals that are shouted, screamed, or
growled. Instead we get gently legato phrases sung with cool liquid clarity.
Echoing the completely unempathetic nature of the truly sociopathic mind, the
detached quality of the vocal delivers a coldness even more suitable to the
themes and more frightening than predictably theatric expressions of murderous
rage or psychotic agony ever could have been.
The drum sound underpinning the music is just as
unexpected in context as the vocal that glides atop it. Highly separated,
individually processed, often sampled percussion would be a much more typical
choice for a sound so synthetic and industrial. Instead we have full-on punk
directness recorded with an at least largely live approach. A fairly minimal set
(I don’t hear any toms but I could be mistaken) comes across with an old-school,
natural, acoustic quality, in which the balanced sound of the kit as a whole
takes precedence over any magnification or treatment of its individual
components. Again, it works. Drummer Jake McCown, who has been with Bloody
Knives since its inception, deploys startling chops with relentless ferocity,
lending the music a gripping percussive dimension.
I probably would have put money down that there’s no
electric bass on this EP, that all the considerable action in the lower
registers is synth bass for sure. A little investigation fully shattered that
inference when I found out that a tremendous portion of the sonic palette
employed somehow emerges at least to begin with from vocalist and founding
member Preston Maddox’s bass.
So Death
offers up a sound that is not only unexpected in itself but has also been
arrived at and put together in unexpected ways. Those familiar with last year’s
Saint Marie full-length Blood will
hear that album’s sound stripped back a bit here, with some of the shoegaze and
dreampop textural layers peeled away in a distillation that somehow scales up
rather than decreases the overall “bang.”
Performance photos of the band’s present incarnation show
McCown with a modest kit; Maddox with bass and a minimal-looking effects array;
and noise specialist and visually compelling pixie-con-cojones Kimberly Calderon
attending intently to a laptop and a few boxes. The question of how any
equivalent of Death’s sound is pulled
off on stage by such a lean-looking ensemble is almost staggering, but judging
by buzz the band’s live impact is proportionate.[2]
Death is a
short EP that yields a big experience. It packs its massive wallop in under
twelve minutes. Three of the tracks are less than two minutes and the longest is
2:36. Neither the shortness of the individual tracks nor the brevity of the
release as a whole registered with me for the first several listens. Before I
actually had a look at the running times, it would have been hard to convince me
that I’d listened to less than at least sixteen intense minutes of
music.
My overall sense of this effort is one of uncompromised
music resulting from musicians doing exactly what they want to do, how they want
to do it, following their own drives and inclinations too intently to be bound
by conventions, audience-pleasing, or even their own previous habits. A
refreshing authenticity pervades the music and seems to characterize the
musicians and their process and methods.
As much as I like this release, I honestly felt a little
battered and agitated after listening to it several times in one particular
afternoon. Such is the nature of this beast. Clearly Death will not be to everyone’s taste,
sonically or thematically. It’s nonetheless executed with passion and commitment
and often daunting skill, and it’s genuinely unusual. For those reasons alone it
deserves your ears for at least the one listen that a quick visit to Bandcamp
will afford you.
Links:
References:
1.
http://mo.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/music/entries/2011/05/16/live_review_bloody_knives_the_1.html (scroll down)
2.
http://www.noiseroom.com/2013/07/30/making-noise-bloody-knives/.jpg)
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