Vinyl Frontier Records

Reviews:

"The Hives' Howlin' Pelle Almqvist may be the sassiest frontman in rock, but he's no storyteller. Nick Cave practically sweats evocative, sordid fiction, but his signature drone rocks you like a lullaby. And then you've got Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie. The barely legal beanpoles who front Seattle's Blood Brothers wail expertly crafted pulp fiction with pre-apocalyptic contortionist aplomb-but evidently, because they do their thang in a ""screamo"" context, Whitney and Blilie don't merit same-sentence standing with the aforementioned hipster gods. Save a few early exceptions, this fourth full-length is not nearly the melodic, experimental departure it was rumored to be, just more of the (often exceptional) old same. Elbow deep in their toy chest, scouring for just the right noisemakers, the boys find it understandably hard to part with tried-and-true stand-bys.

Guitarist Cody Votolato is responsible for the major tweaks to the quintet's Tasmanian Devil act. Once a staunch advocate of the ginsu fretboard bitch-slap passed down from Drive Like Jehu to Pretty Girls Make Graves, he exhibits impressive restraint and cunning here, adopting everything from a twisted neo-rockabilly stutter (""Trash Flavored Trash"") to a creepy swarm of ping-pong bends (""Feed Me to the Forest""). The foreboding, house-of-mirrors organ that made Burn Piano Island Burn's ""Cecilia and the Silhouette Saloon"" an instant art-metal classic resurfaces memorably in ""Peacock Skeleton With Crooked Feathers,"" generating an airtight trampoline for Whitney and Blilie's spastic back-and-forth. Overall, what could have been a breakthrough is instead a second, more focused lap around Piano Island. No crime in that... although not much of a score either.

"