The Blood Brothers: Burn Piano Island, Burn

The flailing shriekers in The Blood Brothers take somewhere between four and five seconds to cook up a din that could cap most punk albums, but Burn Piano Island, Burn's opener, "Guitarmy," isn't a high point; it's a brain-clearing prologue to a record that preys on the matter it's cleared. A hardcore band pitched between the art-punk underground and Warped Tour bigness, The Blood Brothers favors merciless overload on two fronts: a sonic assault that stomps through slinky side-steps and breakdowns, and a lyrical onslaught that heaves non sequiturs in the good name of crooked poetry. The delivery is ruthlessly extreme, churning around treble-piercing guitar noise and vocal seizures that put a strangely melismatic spin on bratty punk screeds. But beneath its red-level overdrive, Burn simmers with gray-shade ideas, squeezing the outsized operatics of progressive-metal into tight hardcore constraints. "Bulimic rainbows vomit what" asks the title track, before careening through a chug-clang massacre that at least feels like a feasible answer. After making a scream-therapy mantra of the title phrase, the band downshifts to a chiming guitar outro, touching on the kind of idea-swings that give Burn its eerie staying power. "Every Breath Is A Bomb" pulses around quivering Mellotron figures before crashing into a reggae lilt, while "Ambulance Vs. Ambulance" mashes frantic spells of melody into cryptic word strings tied around emergency and haunted calm. The album's clever turns don't take away from The Blood Brothers as a ravaging hardcore band; instead, they enlist chops in service of a manic vision all the more insinuating for its brutality. Parsing the group's ideas requires a full-scale surrender to grotesquerie, but when Burn Piano Island, Burn ends with a jolt of sudden silence, the punishment that precedes it lingers like an acute hallucination.