The Blood Brothers Are On Fire, Fire, Fire!

The first time this Gigwise hack met Mark Gajadhar, drummer for Seattle’s excellent export The Blood Brothers, it was in the toilets of Highbury’s Garage back in 2003. I went up to him and asked “You’re in The Blood Brothers aren’t you?” and he smiled and replied “Yeah”. We then shook hands before going our separate ways. At the time their third full-length ‘Burn, Piano Island, Burn’ was about to be released. Produced by Ross Robinson, all the talk was that they were going to be ‘the next At The Drive-In’, a hardcore band notable for both cutting intelligence and lurching time signatures, seeing the world through their own oblique mirror. If however you were to show anyone back then the reality of just what the petulant five-piece would eventually become, four years down the line, then their heads would probably explode. They never became ‘the next At The Drive-In’ because they were too busy concentrating on being, quite simply, The Blood Brothers.

So four years on and again we’re in the company of Mark, in the equally sanitary environment of Islington Academy’s backstage area. Sitting next to the bins. Surprisingly he doesn’t remember our encounter, but he does recall the mood in The Blood Brothers camp around the time. “With ‘Burn…’ we were actually in California, we were put up in these weird apartments with like grandma furniture. And we actually recorded on the beach! Ross had like a motorcycle in the recording studio…a big motor-cross bike. And I guess the vibe was completely different than for (follow-up album) ‘Crimes’. Still a good vibe, but totally different” he says.

Though the band had issued an EP compilation and two previous albums (2002’s terrifyingly abstract ‘March On Electric Children’ proving the highlight) prior to ‘Burn…’, it was that release which truly heralded the band’s arrival. Whether it was the appearance of Ross Robinson, who at the time was still feted for his involvement with the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit (Mark: “We’d never heard of him! He contacted us and we were like ‘it’s some random guy’” It was only after talking to At The Drive-In funnily enough that the deal was done) or the possibility that misguided theatre-goers were snapping up the CD in the hope of hearing Willy Russell’s play of the same name, but The Blood Brothers struck a (mangled) chord with their scrawling, violent and intuitive take on hardcore. Described as everything from art-core to, no kidding, extremo by one magazine, one only had to hear the opening forty-second tantrum of ‘Guitarmy’ to know what The Blood Brothers were about.

Right now their world is inhabited by the dazzling, splintered sprawl of the latest LP ‘Young Machetes’, an album that sounds like the culmination of the millions of threads begun with ‘Crimes’, ‘March On Electric Children’ and, of course, ‘Burn…’ For a record so extreme in its extension of The Blood Brothers sonic palette, Mark seems disquietingly laidback when questioned about the recording process. He even uses the word ‘comfortable’, twice… “It was really similar to ‘Crimes’, because we actually recorded it in the same place. In Seattle, at home, so it was really comfortable. With this album we actually did a lot more jamming, rather than anybody coming up with parts. Just kind of like sit in the practice spot for eight hours and somebody would start making some noise, I’ll play a drumbeat and then we’d just kind of build from that.”