Twenty years ago, the United States was in the middle of a war, fanning the flames of a dubious type of patriotism, and the Christian Right were trying to impose their worldview on the rest of us. It’s a good thing we got past all that, right?
The Blood Brothers released Crimes in an election year, and its unsettling vision is starting to feel evergreen 20 years after its release. In a “Rank Your Records” article for Vice, co-lead singer Jordan Blilie mentioned that he wanted to capture the feelings of fear and paranoia that come with wartime, and they succeeded. Their influence is heard in bands like Chat Pile, who catalog the fallout of war on this fall’s excellent Cool World. Where Chat Pile take their inspirations and converts them to unambiguous confrontation, the Blood Brothers’ critiques come in a barrage of unsettling abstract imagery, pushing critique to the point of bleak satire. This quality, along with the endless inventiveness of the music, makes Crimes a perennial and the best record in their formidable discography.
The Blood Brothers’ breakthrough, Burn Piano Island Burn!, sounded like barely contained chaos and delivered a maniacal thrill ride that didn’t let up. If Piano Island! made listeners want to smash the gas on the highway or start a circle pit in their living rooms, Crimes made them take a cautious look out the window and make sure they locked the deadbolt.
In Crimes, the Blood Brothers leaned harder into different sounds and slower tempos, and the arrangements and use of instruments not usually heard in hardcore and screamo songs. Johnny Whitney’s keyboards drove on many of the songs, and the phenomenal talents of drummer Mark Gajadhar and multi-instrumentalists Morgan Henderson and Cody Votolato drive these tracks forward with a malevolent momentum. The stripped-down musical arrangements also put an even finer point in the brilliance of the vocals’ duality. Blilie’s lower range and Johhny Whitney’s high-pitched screams seamlessly capture horror and resignation. They seem to represent different takes on the world collapsing around them.
“Peacock Skeleton with Crooked Feathers” is one of the most musically exciting tracks on Crimes, with its keys and maracas-forward intro that builds to some breakdowns and lyrics about distrust sewed by a nefarious peacock. It could be read as an attack on the fear being spun by news outlets and our social circles. While they weren’t the first band to incorporate keyboards into hardcore, they most certainly perfected it.
Some of the most chilling and provocative songs are the ones where the Blood Brothers stretch furthest away from the breakneck noise of Piano Island, and that only adds to their power. The opener, “Feed Me to the Forest”, might be the definitive Blood Brothers song. It shows off the new wrinkles in their sound while also assuring that they haven’t lost their flair for the bracing noise that is their calling card. It begins with a warning screech of guitars before lurching to life, and with Blilie and Whitney piling up a series of unsettling images, from smokestacks that “look like fuck you towers” and their repercussions, including taking a character’s singing voice away and babies begging to be fed to the forest. The song explodes into what could be the defining lines of the record: “Thanks for the survival rags / Thanks for the soiled skies / Thanks for the fucked up future / We can learn to love our misery.”
The title track is another peak example, a song’s slow burn that conveys an apocalyptic sense of hopelessness through its images of Junk Island, where kids eat apple cores and huff paint. That place is the goal destination after the main characters consider robbing the mayor’s mansion or a lonely widow. The images of used-up people and resources are genuinely unsettling, comparing people to condom wrappers and yesterday’s headlines. “Live at the Apocalypse Cafe” is of a piece with “Crimes”, with its list of atrocities committed by various characters and observed on television. “Wolf Party” also eschews fast tempos for building to unsettling verses that focus on keys over guitars.
“Trash Flavored Trash” has only become even more relevant, with its critique of media attempting to sweep the underbelly of America under the rug. The surreal images of priests making bombs out of bibles and boys in toupees speaking in resumes seemingly make this scorched earth go round. It feels prophetic. “Teen Heat” critiques the music industry through some genuinely hilarious and absurd images, such as an executive with his sideburns shaved into dollar signs who gives birth to diva after diva and the memorable chant, “Promageddon pit, smash hit.”
“Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck” is a short story that matches anything Chuck Palahniuk created in his best afternoon writing. The main character is stuck in the hospital, replaying a horrific incident haunted by his past. But there is a streak of gallows humor amid the vivid imagery of vomit-stained frat parties and the twisted fortune cookie of “Some things never get better / Like used cars and bad livers.” The way Whitney sings “love” repeatedly makes him sound like it should be in a different song, but somehow it works. The same goes for “Rats and Rats and Rats for Candy”, switching between the point of view of Candy’s date and the titular rats as a disturbing tale of a date gone wrong.
“Celebrator” and “Devastator”, the final two songs, are black-hearted, pointed critiques of George W. Bush and the Iraq War, with soldiers shooting black cum from their victory hard-ons while children are pulled from the rubble. “Celebrator” aims at Bush directly, with the line “The clown in the fight suit is cracking jokes to the camera crew,” referencing his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech from an aircraft carrier just months into the Iraq war. Meanwhile, “Devastator” opens like a haunted folk song before the band kick in, and as Whitney and Blilie chant, “Everybody needs a little devastation”.
By focusing on the human costs and covering them in unsettling and sometimes absurdist imagery, the Blood Brothers ensured that Crimes would have a longer shelf-life than typical protest music and its images of the horrors of war we are all watching on television, or our phones are as relevant as they were 20 years ago. Lyrically, it is a pitch-black satire and critique of its time that highlights how little has changed. It would be depressing if the music weren’t so thrilling.
I remember thinking this record sounds like the end of the world in 2004, and 20 years later, it still does. We have only inched closer to the mirror the Blood Brothers were holding up. On Burn Piano Island, Burn, one of the most memorable lines is “everything is going to be just awful when we’re around”. It is unsettling to see that their commentary still has a remarkable relevance as they gear up for reunion shows two decades later. It’s still awful, but a little less so with the Blood Brothers around.