Review Summary: The Blood Brothers's fourth full-length album is the devilish and campy expansion of the band's sound, but don't think for a second that it isn't user-friendly.
One of the reasons I really love
Crimes is that it detaches itself from most of what people used to define as The Blood Brothers by shifting away from the rigid discordance of records like
...Burn Piano Island, Burn and into both pop and post-industrial territories. Gone are the five minute screaming contests and, for the most part, the same can be said about the spastic whirlwinds of sound that guide the listener from aspect to aspect of The Blood Brothers's synthesis. No,
Crimes is focused on the exemplification of a new sound for the band, one which works better when limited to three or four minutes of foot-tapping rhythms and leisurely experimental post-hardcore characteristics. Don't believe it? Well then, allow the morosely sexual scuzz-punk-meets-pop masterwork "Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck" to prove you wrong. Or perhaps the ridiculously catchy, yet oddly brash "Trash Flavored Trash" is more your speed. Both tracks are able to put skeptics into their place, as neither of the tracks's contrasting goals are achieved by convoluted or haphazard means; each track is straightforward in terms of structure, but quirky in terms of execution. The immediate reaction: it's much better for it, too.
The brevity of the tracks and the pop-leaning structures make
Crimes feel like a synthesis of not only styles, but of several hooks and angular dissonance as well, making The Blood Brothers's fourth full-length album an interesting, but deeply fulfilling listen. They've streamlined the writing process so songs are able to innovate more and venture further without being prolix. Take for example, "Peacock Skeleton with Crooked Feathers," a foray into intensity and Latin-meets-electronic flair. Similarly, "My First Kiss at the Public Execution" combines the grueling squalls of Johnny Whitney and the ancillary inclusions of Jordan Billie's lugubrious baritone with industrial fugues and an obvious post-hardcore influence. These tracks scream exuberance and accessibility from the depths of highly abused throats, but better yet, it signals an expansion of the band's sound rather than a full-blown departure.
Each of the songs has that quirky Blood Bros. charisma, based around the spastic intensity of
...Burn Piano Island, Burn and
This Adultery Is Ripe while expanding upon the experimental ideals founded by such records as
March On Electric Children. The result of this combination is a genre mix-n-match, just campy enough to be interesting and distinct, but not so much that it becomes a hysterical nuisance. Sure, humor gets the spotlight on "Rats and Rats and Rats for Candy" when Whitney's squeals take the reigns, but the song's execution makes this quality seem more like charisma than anything else. Granted, the whole vocal warm-up theme on "Devastator" is hysterical, but again, The Blood Brothers just feels
quaint, so it comes naturally. On "Beautiful Horses" they make metaphors about urine and disabled horses (it's a social criticism, of course) and move into eighties-era alternative trends and intense post-hardcore moments. "Wolf Party"is a droner dedicated to bedroom-noise-pop themes, and album opener "Feed Me to the Forest" is an immediately catchy but noticeably odd dose of post-hardcore. The amount of times this whole "user-friendly" term applies to the style-collage that is
Crimes gives you the impression that the album's goal is to provide an accessible take on the innovative; in that aspect, it achieves all it sets out for, if with campy grit conjoined at its hip.
