Review Summary: You don't need a doctor honey, you need a mortician baby.
Back in the day, before every kid on the street had listened to Japanese noise artists and before everyone had ripped them off, The Blood Brothers used to be a ***ing scary band.
This Adultery is Ripe, their first release is the epitome of that. It’s a heavily gritty experience, with vocalists Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney at their most vicious and un-tuneful and the band playing their most focused yet aggressive material they ever wrote. It is consistently urgent, constantly evolving, and continually unrelenting. If you’re looking for 20 minutes of macabre hardcore, there is really no reason to look any other place.
Immediately you are hit with shrieks of “They’re ***ing after us” and followed by disturbing lyrical imagery such as “they’re stalking me, hiding in mirrors like flesh jack-o-lanterns” and “like a choir of boiling lobsters”. At this point, the Blood Brothers hadn’t learned the finer points of subtlety. What they lack in tact, they made up for with raw energy, as “Doctor, Doctor” features some incredibly intriguing vocal interplay. While the lyrics are equally off putting and disturbing (“I wanna cut the corners off your lips, I wanna shave the angles off your cheeks, I wanna wash the geometry off your face”), there is a certain charm to the way it is all delivered throughout the album, and even when they are discussing matters that would have had them killed in previous centuries, you can’t help but dig it just a little more than you should.
The music is generally just as angular as the subject matter would make it seem. While the bass on the album isn’t quite comparable to future Blood Brothers projects (admittedly though, the bassline in “Jordan Blilie Pets The Wild Horses Mane” is pretty sick), the guitar riffs are just as oddly paced and constructed as ever. They generally lead the songs along in their loosely structured punk rhythms, with the occasional outburst of heavily distorted leads. The music is way more groove oriented than what most people are used to from the band, and the songs generally evolve at a more natural pace. Not to say it is normal in the least; with sudden growls or guitar feedback being commonplace. If Fugazi had been a horror punk band, they probably would have toured with The Blood Brothers in these days.
Most people aren’t going to like
This Adultery is Ripe, for good reason. It’s an abrasive, uninviting look into what The Blood Brothers see as flaws in society, and whether it’s the graphic lyrics or unapologetically harsh production and guitar riffs, there is plenty here to hate. However, if you are a fan of their later work or into more straightforward hardcore punk (hey there, old AFI fans),
This Adultery is Ripe is an incredibly precise intense 20 minutes of CATHARTIC noise. For what it is,
Adultery is nearly flawless.
