ON THE ROAD WITH AFI

The word punk has been thrown around more times than a musty sweatrag in a backstage dressing room.
So let’s get back to the true meaning of the word, the original sense of a sound, an attitude, emanating from young, fiery counter-culturalists armed with instruments used for breaking ground, dropping stealth bombs of foundation-shattering songs that detonate in punk’s commercial corpse, making you stand up and ask, “What the f**k is this?” and wanting more.

THE BLOOD BROTHERS are a punk band in the purest sense. The Seattle-based five piece is punk in the way that only a band that changes their intricate rhythms every couple seconds, smashes beats over your head like a hailstorm of percussive shrapnel, and screams social critiques wrapped in post-modern images can be. They’re punk in that they would rather bite the hand that feeds them than allow it to place any sort of leash around their creativity, working steadfastly on indie labels until a producer who was excited about their uncompromising ethic and unusual musical style, Ross Robinson, approached with the promise of allowing them to make music 100 percent their way. “I loved everything about them the first time I heard them,” says Robinson, whose production credits include At the Drive In, Slipknot, and Limp Bizkit. “The beats were really cool, the singing was on fire, and the guitar and bass playing were just perfectly amazing. Everything about it just pressed my buttons.”

And so now we bring you Burn Piano Island, Burn, the third full length from vocalists Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney, guitarist Cody Votolato, drummer Mark Gajadhar, and bassist Morgan Henderson. The album doesn’t so much start as it flicks a lit match through a quick fuse of hot tempered, post-modern punk. Starting with the 37 second long “Guitarmy,” Burn lives up to its name, leaving barely enough space to take a breath before splintering through multi-leveled layers of white noise, baroque atmospherics, duel vocal theatrics and mazes of angular guitar spasms while the bass and drums keep pulse with a darkly erratic heartbeat. Add to that chaotic combination flashes of acoustic guitar, vintage electric pianos and a xylophone, and you have a band that’s very uncomfortable treading ground that’s been stomped one time too many.

Although they may be more difficult to slot into a box than your typical, steroids-pumped hardcore act or three chord punks, The Blood Brothers aren’t complaining. They’ve been building a steady underground following across the nation since forming in 1997. Three years after becoming a band, The Blood Brothers birthed This Adultery is Ripe on Second Nature, an artfully vitriolic avant-hardcore catharsis, with brains as sharp as its claws. 2001 saw the follow up to that well-loved debut, March on Electric Children, a record about which the Village Voice enthusiastically begged, “If this is the sound of youth decaying, then stick a dead teenager in my ear” while NME called the record “Utterly deranged. But deeply, deeply compelling.

Burn Piano Island, Burn suffers fools no less gladly, as again the vocal tagteam spews surreal punk poetry about “bulimic rainbows” (“Burn Piano Island, Burn”), millionaires eating their shadows (“Six Nightmares at the Pinball Masquerade”) and bodies getting crucified across cacti where love once grew (“I Know Where the Canaries and the Crows Go”). Each track is a careful construction of art and intellect -damaged aggression, one fueled by energy, excitement, and a ferocious desire to tear down the settled, cobweb-sprouting pillars of both our musical and social existence.

Live, The Blood Brothers are just as combustible and unpredictable, as the individual members become perfectly discordant parts, ramming into each other like a grand sonic car crash, engines revved and sparks flying, a chaotic reaction with methods to every move.

Diversity is an asset severely lacking in the mainstream’s disposable punk culture, but thanks to acts like The Blood Brothers, our culture’s dead ends are merely fodder for new material, as Burn Piano Island, Burn makes a funeral pyre out of the standard approach to modern punk.