Big Blood - Sew Your Wild Days Tour Vol. II (Dontrustheruin, 2007)

1. Haystack
2. She Said Nothing II
3. Rodin Deadpan
4. Frost Farm
5. Got Wings?
6. I'm So Glad
7. So Po Swing
8. Moon Perfume
9. 'Preese 'Preese
10. I've Been a Baby All My Life (I Hope You Don't Expect a Man)

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Big Blood - Sew Your Wild Days Tour Vol. I (Dontrustheruin, 2007)

1 Adversaries & Enemies
2 Vitamin C
3 Spit Shine
4 Don't Trust The Ruin II
5 Moonin' Away
6 Wrinkles & Ribbons
7 Song For Baltimore

Duo formé de Caleb Mulkerin et Colleen Kinsella (ex-Cerberus Shoal) qui nous livre là une indispensable folk psychédélique lo-fi (à noter l'excellente reprise de Vitamin C de Can)...

The ‘Sew Your Wild Days’ Tour discs share no more than any other pair of discs; in fact, Volume I may be the most fractured collection of songs found on any of the discs, beginning innocuously with the casual honky-tonk anthem “Adversaries & Enemies” – a familiar mix of lone, plucky banjo and Colleen like an army of voices – but breaking miraculously into a rendition of CAN’s “Vitamin C”, a brilliant reading with acoustic instruments of hand claps, accordion, and guitar; the first instance that Colleen’s delivery is anything less than confident (perhaps it’s the daunting task of replicating Suzuki), her doubled shriek/quiver is stabilized with slashes of distorted guitar which echo like a departing electric storm. Rather than return home, “Spit Shine” continues to push in new directions with a quickened rock’n’roll gait, sort of Meat Puppets, with sharp, high-end guitar leading a chugging army of weaving strings, cymbal percussion, and a possible singing saw; “Don’t Trust The Ruin II” introduces a new electronic element, with crackles and whispy streaks over a distorted loop of piano, Colleen’s sing-song a pleasantly different, free-form pop recital which indicates no continuity with the tune’s prequel. The unusually brief (1:55), unusually dancey “Moonin’ Away” features looped guitar riffage with a weird bass bounce, sliding into the Isaac Brock carnival of loops, “Wrinkles & Ribbons”. Cutting ahead to Volume II, the gauze of static on the recording “Haystack (a.p.)” materializes Colleen’s words as she begins “sitting in this bedroom/…/and all my dreams have turned to static” over a gentle acoustic guitar and the echo of her own voice. Another sequel, “She Said Nothing II” actually recalls the melody of the original, this time a wordless reissue with an added patina of cross-channel noise, then fading as Caleb does his best Uncle Charlie [R.I.P.] for the weird Sun City Girls pop song “Rodin Deadpan” (SGC again recalled ‘Torch of the Mystics’-style on the sardonic “Got Wings?”), and again switching attitudes with “Frost Farm”, a melancholy song of banjo and what is likely thumb-piano, Colleen’s vocal part somehow reminiscent the Brit-pop gloom of The Sundays, etc. “I’m So Glad” is a painfully brief Skip James cover sung by Colleen, funneled through an aging machine which washes all trace of era from her voice and lone guitar. A curveball, the John Fahey guitar of “Moon Perfume” comes out of no where like a David Grubbs instrumental, accented by recorded rainfall and traffic. In the end, “I’ve Been A Baby All My Life (I Hope You Don’t Expect A Man)” returns the thick atmospheric of the opening song, summarizing the album’s “roots” feel with a folksy guitar song only slightly-skewed by Caleb’s falsetto.

A special treat rather arbitrarily included with Volume I, ‘A Quiet Lousy Roar’ is a 4” x 4” comic book by artist Michael Connor inspired by Big Blood’s first CDr. The imagery is reminiscent of the Tony Millionaire fantasy ‘Billy Hazelnuts’, yet with that book’s dementia replaced by an adoring, almost fawning optimism inspired by the Kinsella-Mulkerin family. As with previous Big Blood CDrs, each printed disc comes packaged with handmade covers designed by Colleen, assorted art scrap, vellum set list, and family pictures. In my transparent efforts to gain honorary membership in this band, I exhaust myself; as I wait with baited breath, I simultaneously fear the day a new bundle of songs arrives which I will inevitably prostrate myself before (figuratively, of course). Such is my fate.

Animal Psi

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