The Blood Brothers: Crimes (bone white vinyl) [EPITAPH]

Why you'll love it

This Epitaph reissue comes on bone white vinyl in a gatefold jacket with a printed inner sleeve and an LP-size booklet. Crimes was the Seattle band's fourth album and its sharpest, produced by John Goodmanson in two months at home.

This edition

• Bone white vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Printed inner sleeve
• LP-size booklet
• Pressed in the Czech Republic
• Lyrics included
• Stereo mix

About the album

Two singers is usually one too many for a band. The Blood Brothers made it their whole identity: Johnny Whitney's piercing shriek and Jordan Blilie's lower bark trade lines, collide and finish each other's sentences, while the band underneath lurches from hardcore to cabaret to something close to a pop song.

They picked John Goodmanson to produce because they loved his work with Unwound, and he gave them room to stretch. Morgan Henderson plays bass, upright bass, accordion and synths, Cody Votolato adds trumpet and baritone guitar to his riffs, and Mark Gajadhar drives it all at full tilt. "Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck" is a fistful of hooks, "Peacock Skeleton with Crooked Feathers" sways like a twisted waltz, the title track slows to a piano crawl, and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs drops in on guitar for "Wolf Party." Blilie drew the sleeve's odd little figures himself.

Twenty years on it still sounds like nobody else, a post-hardcore record with a flair for theatre. Song titles alone could keep a poetry seminar busy for a term, and "Rats and Rats and Rats for Candy" is the one they'd assign first.

Also at Kops: more The Blood Brothers on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Epitaph (cat# 87058-1), a reissue of the 2004 album.