Crooning In Plastic Bags

The Blood Brothers @ Irving Plaza 11/12/2006
(I’m not great with their song titles, so there’s a few that I didn’t get though they were familiar – if you were there please let me know what those songs were! I think that they did “Trash Flavored Trash” toward the beginning but I’m not certain.) Vital Beach / Teen Heat / ? / ? / Laser Life / Camouflage, Camouflage / Set Fire To The Face On Fire / ? / Peacock’s Skeleton With Crooked Feathers / You’re The Dream Unicorn / 1, 2, 3, 4 Guitars / ? / Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck / Cecilia and the Silhouette Saloon / Giant Swan

The Blood Brothers “Spit Shine Your Black Clouds” – Though it was disappointing that they did not play any of my four favorites from the new album (“Spit Shine…,” “Lift The Veil, Kiss The Tank,” “Street Wars/Exotic Foxholes,” “We Ride Skeletal Lightning”), I was very impressed by the Blood Brothers’ performance, which was about as visceral and exhausting as I had been expecting. The band cater mainly to the kids moshing in the center of the room, but they weren’t exactly shying away from their more experimental numbers. Vocalists Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie are sort of fascinating to behold, and not just because it’s so amazing to see that they can keep up with that sort of relentless shrieking for an hour. There’s an interesting contrast between their demeanors on stage — Whitney is flamboyant and prone to stealing moves from Freddie Mercury and Mick Jagger, whereas Blilie skulks around the back of the stage like a sullen teen with bad posture who can’t bare to look at the audience, even when he’s addressing them in between-song “thank you” banter. I had imagined that they would have been more aggro and confrontational, but the incongruity of Blilie’s shyness and Whitney’s fabulousness somehow seemed to emphasize the profound anguish in their songs. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

Celebration “War” – Celebration’s debut album is a pretty decent record, but it’s not quite adequate in terms of capturing the magic of their live show. The songs have a certain stiffness on tape, but in concert, they are slippery and frenetic jumbles of rhythm and harmony. Everything about their performance sounds thoroughly human and totally alive, as if they are trying to shake an audience full of uninspired, sleepwalking people back into life. Aside from “China,” the best songs in their set were brand new (including a number that brought in Mark Gajadhar from the Blood Brothers as a second drummer), and so I think there’s a good chance that their forthcoming second album may come closer to getting it right. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

To be very honest, a lot of my motivation for sticking around through And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead’s performance was rooted in a lingering feeling of pity that came after reading this thoroughly depressing Pitchfork interview with band leader Conrad Keely. As I watched the show, I couldn’t help but think about how miserable Keely came across in that feature, and how his band’s grand ambitions almost always led to either commercial or artistic failure.

The band is constantly reaching for grandeur, but aside from the key tracks from Source Tags and Codes, they end up with these sort of pompous, overblown songs that do not earn their emotional weight. Their two most recent albums are like the musical equivalent of Oscar bait — it’s all gravitas for its own sake and unimaginative signifiers of artistic significance propping up mediocre compositions.* When they do write something quite special, such as the Source Tags opener “It Was There That I Saw You,” they go and butcher the song in concert, with Keely’s thin, off-key voice barely poking through the over-rendered mess of guitars and plodding percussion.

The band’s live show gets a substantial shot of adrenaline when drummer Jason Reese abandons his kit and switches to lead vocals on some fierce hardcore numbers, but in spite of his stronger voice and considerable stage presence, it only complicates the band’s obvious and crippling identity crisis. In the Pitchfork interview, Keely seems baffled as to why his band isn’t hugely popular, and the answer is just so incredibly obvious: Aside from having a pretty terrible name, they have no recognizable persona. Keely is a fine guitarist but a lousy singer; Reese is a decent frontman but for a different band; and their new album sounds absolutely nothing like their live show, which itself is going through at least four different identities over the course of an hour and thirty minutes. It is good that the band are willing to try different things, but without some dominant personality or unifying style, they end up sounding unfocused and often quite generic.

* The best song on their new record is a cover of Guided By Voices’ “Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” but only by default. In the Pitchfork interview, Keely explains that they recorded their version of the song because he felt that the version on Bee Thousand was “extremely unfinished.” Unfortunately, his band’s overwrought, expensive arrangement tears out the context that made the original so affecting. Much of the beauty of the original came from the way that the fragile, ramshackle tune seemed haunted by the ghost of some arena rock anthem. Trail of Dead’s version is depressingly literal – they simply play it as a straight-up arena rock thing and drain every bit of poetry from the song.