Written
by Daniel Boyer, posted by blog admin
It’s
difficult to pin one stylistic label for Minneapolis’ Black Bluebirds. Their
album Like Blood for Music has a sharp fatalistic point of view on many of its
songs, but chief songwriter Daniel Fiskum imbeds those adult messages in
pleasing and recognizable structures sure to win a significant audience. The
dominant mode for much of the album is hard rock, but Black Bluebirds never
embrace the same tropes we hear from paint by numbers riff rock. Black
Bluebirds, instead, employ a stylized vision of hard rock incorporating more
acoustic textures than you might expect and a second de facto lead vocalist
with singer Jessica Rasche. The juxtaposition of her voice with Fiskum’s intense
near drone gives many of the songs a distinct flavor of their own.
“Love
Kills Slowly” sets up everything that follows with a keen ear for drama and
substance alike. Fiskum and Rasche’s voices weave together with a strong effect
and it never sounds too overwrought or affected. The contributions from
guitarist Simon Husbands is important, but never mars the arrangement with
undue histrionics. The lean fierceness of “Strange Attractor” contrasts well
with the opener and shows another side of the trio’s hard rock identity without
veering too far from what we hear in the opener. Fiskum has a stronger vocal
presence here than we hear in the song “Love Kills Slowly”, but Rasche’s
singing hovers just below the surface of the mix and fills the song with her
spirit. “Life in White” is the first significant shift in the album’s sound.
The incorporation of acoustic guitar into their musical DNA comes off
seamlessly and Foskum’s synthesizer lines support the guitar work quite nicely.
The light jangle of the six string is slightly offset by the theatrical,
declamatory tone of Fiskum’s voice.
There’s
a light punk spirit driving “Battlehammer” on, but the sound is predominantly
hard rock and the band builds quite a head of steam from the beginning. Drummer
Chad Helmonds is responsible for a lot of this, but Husbands lays some colorful
guitar over the top. “Soul of Wood” is, arguably, of the best hard rock moments
on Black Bluebirds’ Like Blood for Music. There’s no doubt the band is a
convincing hard rock outfit and their ability to manipulate their sound in
surprising ways sets them apart from the pack. It seems improbable, but the
band turns their hands towards a ballad of sorts with the track “Don’t Fall in
Love” – the blending of such a deliberate tempo with lyrical piano and
impassioned vocals from Fiskum and Rasche alike make this one of the album’s
more memorable, albeit unlikely, moments.
The
finale, “Legendary”, bears some superficial similarities to the aforementioned
tune in terms of tempo, but the similarities end there. Black Bluebirds strip
away a lot of the storm of sound we hear with earlier songs in favor of a much
more economical, yet cinematic, approach. The song definitely wants to conjure
a mood for listeners and invoke atmosphere far more than show off chops to no
appreciable end. Black Bluebirds’ Like Blood for Music is a fantastic moment
for the modern indie music scene and the three piece shows immense promise for the
future. Daniel Fiskum and Jessica Rasche are an unique singing tandem and they’ve
only begun to explore their potential together.
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