Album Review:
Bloody Knives || Death EP
Reviewed by Dan Joy (Asst. Editor at WTSH)
Partially cross posted from the excellent music blog
You haven’t
heard any music that sounds very much like that of Austin, Texas trio Bloody Knives. At least, I haven’t heard anything—with the exception to some extent of
earlier material by the band—that sounds much like the six short tracks on the
band’s vinyl-only EP Death, recently released on Saint Marie Records. How often
do we honestly get to say that a band or recording is truly that distinctive?
This is
intense, pummeling, unsettling music, sometimes featuring sharp, startling
turns and contrasts. A formidable surge of synthetic industrial sound is
underpinned and propelled by classic, riveting punk drumming, with smooth,
clear, almost crystalline vocals hovering above. These are components that
“shouldn’t” work together and one might almost say couldn’t possibly work
together as well as they do here.
Find also in
this admixture touches of spacerock, a shoegaze appreciation for complexity of
texture (the sound is super-fuzzy), dazzling runs of what sound like vintage
prog keyboard leads, washes of noise, and a few interludes of abstract ambient
beauty. An Austin outlet described the band’s sound as “rock/stoner
metal/psychedelic”[1] and the metal connection has come up elsewhere as well,
remarkably so given that the band works without guitars. How ever one might
identify the various elements, they come together into a unique, eerie,
compelling whole that can’t adequately be communicated by summing up its parts.
Lyrics and
thematic content are as darkly intense as the sonic experience and are
consistent with the mercilessness of the band name and the stark album title.
Every track is a vignette in which a few brief phrases are repeated in an
incantatory manner to evoke the viewpoint of a different, historically actual serial
killer. Song names include “Waiting For You to Die,” “Kill You All,” and
“Bullet in Your Head.”
One could
easily expect music with such thrash, drive, and horrific themes to be topped
off with vocals that are shouted, screamed, or growled. Instead we get gently
legato phrases sung with cool liquid clarity. Echoing the completely
unempathetic nature of the truly sociopathic mind, the detached quality of the
vocal delivers a coldness even more suitable to the themes and more frightening
than predictably theatric expressions of murderous rage or psychotic agony ever
could have been...
