>>PREVIEW
BLOOD BROTHERS
Monday, December 11
MacEwan Ballroom
From the grinding emo assaults of their earliest releases to their recent flirtations with creepy cabaret-pop, The Blood Brothers have never been content to stick to the beaten path. On their newest album Young Machetes, the Seattle five-piece had famed Fugazi guitarist and Rites Of Spring front man Guy Piccioto working behind the boards, pushing them to a partial return to their more frenzied sounds of the past. "Most of the musical decisions in terms of the direction of the record were made before he even came into the picture," explains Johnny Whitney, one half of the Blood Brothers’s two-man vocal attack. "But what Guy did most is help us in the areas where we were less familiar, pushing our ideas farther than we might have taken them ourselves." Piccioto did not handle the knob-twiddling all on his own however, choosing instead to collaborate on Machetes with John Goodmanson, the engineer and producer responsible for the Blood Brothers’s 2004 album Crimes. "It was different in the sense that there was a lot more encouragement and wise opinions dispersed throughout each song," says Whitney. "It’s just much more comfortable having two people that you really respect working on your record than just one, because there’s less opportunity for a bad idea to come about."Whitney has no qualms calling Piccioto’s former bands an inspiration, yet says the hardcore hero’s politics have had no effect on his own lyrical content. "I don’t really aspire for us to be a political band in the way Fugazi was, it’s just not really something that’s interesting to me," he says. "I do try to inform myself and stay involved in current news and politics, but to me the music and the creativity and the fans always come before that."
As busy as they may sound, the members of The Blood Brothers also split their time with other creative offshoots. Whitney runs the clothing company Crystal City with his wife Amy Carlsen, while also playing in the synthed-up side-project Neon Blonde with Brothers drummer Mark Gajadhar. Singer Jordan Billie and guitarist Cody Votolato also play in the some-might-call-them-a-supergroup Head Wound City, along with two members of The Locust and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
"The thing about the Blood Brothers is that we’re all so opinionated and often in ways that contradict each other," Whitney says. "I spend most of my life in one way or another working with the band, so if I didn’t have another outlet of music I probably would have lost my mind."
The Blood Brothers are now in the midst of a massive tour with the similarly titled Brothers And Sisters, the underrated 4AD act Celebration and the annoyingly punctuated …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Whitney says these dates are going well so far, but thinks they may have affected their potential audience.
"I feel like the people who come out to see them (Trail Of Dead) are maybe a bit older then our general fanbase, so perhaps we’re exposing our music to more people our own age this tour," he says. "Those kind of things are very hard to gauge though, until perhaps the next tour you go on when you can see what kinds of new faces are there."
They’ve likely seen their fair share of these over the years, as the Brothers have now been at it for nearly a decade. Fortunately, even after transitioning to a major label and working with Ross "father of nu-metal" Robinson (credited with bringing Limp Bizkit and Korn to the mainstream), the band’s distinct sound is yet to be dumbed down.
"We came to a point where if we hadn’t gone to a major label and done that record with Ross Robinson, I honestly don’t think we’d still be a band," says Whitney. "But with both of the major labels we’ve been on, it’s been clear from the beginning that the only people allowed to dictate the creative direction of our records are us." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.