If you killed a Great White Shark and used your bare hands to take out its teeth, then devised a way to put those teeth - along with a substantial amount of razor blades - into a mine or explosive of some kind and set the mine or explosive off at a Green Day show, you would rival the volatility, ingenuity and utter disregard for contemporary punk/emo/whatever conventions that characterize the work of Seattle's The Blood Brothers.
In 2003, after the quintet released two ferociously abrasive albums, their ravenous furor focused and peaked on their third album, "...Burn, Piano Island, Burn." Perhaps the most discordantly caustic album of recent memory, "Piano Island" was a decapitating assault of hardcore, punk, post-punk, and experimental music that was inescapably noisy and irresistibly powerful.
On the group's follow-up album, 2004's "Crimes," the Brothers unveiled a gnarled, cackling pop sensibility that, with keyboard hooks and laptop effects, rendered their scathingly brutal sound undeniably catchy. With an inexorable energy and creativity, "bated breath" hardly describes the anticipation that preceded the release of The Blood Brothers' fifth album.
That album, "Young Machetes," doesn't buckle under the weight of these expectations. In this fifth studio album, produced by Fugazi's Guy Piccioto, The Blood Brothers don't sell out, go soft in their old age, or realize any tired pop clich?©s. Yet the album, for a multitude of reasons, just isn't very good.
The listener can tell that this band is commendably trying to elaborate on the unique style of disemboweling pop music they achieved on "Crimes," and "Young Machetes," and it does feature a few prime examples of the genius this band is capable of.
Opening gambit "Set Fire to the Face of Fire" ranks with some of their finest work. The crunching low-end bass evokes Tool being played in a racecar, and the two-pronged, wild-eyed yelping of co-lead singers Jordan Billie and Johnny Whitney are frightening enough to send the most thoroughly battered eardrums running for the Alkaline Trio record. Most people probably would - if not for the scream-along chorus. Ditto for "Huge Gold AK-47," which gets as many props for its surfy guitars, sing-along "Whoa-Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!" sections and chameleon-like transitions as it does for its wonderful title.
On parts of "Young Machetes," however, the hardcore-plus-pop formula falls totally flat. "You're the Dream Unicorn!" for example, is loud and dynamic, but it has nothing else to hang its hat on. There's no vibrancy, no hooky chorus or instrumentation, no underlying pop sensibility - just a limp chord progression and an earful of shouting. The band's collective knack for catchiness, in this case, is deployed not to imbue a hardcore song with a Michael Jackson heart, but to make a pummeling song less pummeling.
The worst, though, is when the Brothers take this middling approach to songs that were never fierce or loud in the first place. "Spit Shine Your Black Clouds" is a plodding nightmare of repetitive keyboards, beginner drums and - the most un-Blood Brothers tactic of all - Billie and Whitney both singing. It's good the Brothers are thinking outside the box, but this moment also provides their poorest display as vocalists.
With its hum-drum guitars and boring verses, "Lift the Veil, Kiss the Tank" is basically three minutes of filler that leads up to a theatrically cheesy refrain of "Death is death/ no matter how you dress it up." If My Chemical Romance watched the news, this is what they would sound like.
All these missteps don't mean that the Blood Brothers have sold out on "Young Machetes." It is, however, confounding - and frustrating - to hear a band so blessed with volatility sound like they are throwing in the towel.
With its dazzling sparks of genius, "Young Machetes" is by no stretch a bad album. But with its sizable chunks of droning loudness and dead moth personality, it definitely isn't good. It rests in an unremarkable gray zone of okay-ness that ultimately commands little replay. As far as disses go, worse things have been said, but for a band as energetic and thoroughly bursting with ideas as The Blood Brothers, this is a low blow.
