This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Seattle’s Blood Brothers are not for the squeamish. Or anyone else, for that matter.
That may sound like an insult, but it’s the opposite — in an era of manufactured, market-driven music aimed at the lowest common denominator, it’s heartening to find bands that go out of their way to thumb their noses at cliche.
Virtually nothing about this freakazoid fivesome or their fire-breathing fourth album Crimes could be seen as a commercial ploy. Not the lurching, spastic grooves of their art-damaged post-punk. Not the searing, jagged guitar lines that writhe and strike with the stabbing aggression of pit vipers. And certainly not the two vocalists who spend most of these 13 tracks shrieking like novocaine-deprived root-canal patients while spewing dark, dementedly surreal poetry (“I want to wear the skin of a magazine baby”).
When you stitch them all together into adventurous altars to anarchy like Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck and Rats and Rats and Rats For Candy, you have a band intense enough to make Marilyn Manson sleep with a nightlight.
If that’s a crime, save me a cell next to these guys.
