Local Reviews: Blood At Ease
The Holes That House the Seeds
Before the advent of cheap paper-making techniques, scribes of all sorts — monks, record keepers, playwrights, etc. — would reuse expensive parchment or tablets by washing or scraping old text from the page before writing over it, leaving faint but discernible layers of multiple pieces of writing. In a lot of ways, the debut album by Kalamazoo-based indie band Blood At Ease functions as a layered object akin to one of these medieval palimpsests, a thing that yields meaning and beauty not just through its most apparent elements, but also through the successive layers that subtly alter and inflect the larger whole. Make no mistake, the most apparent elements here — the bittersweet guitar melodies, the high, delicate vocals — are good on their own, great, even. But it is in the small, judicious choices in musicianship and mixing that really make this album something worth listening to. Take the opening track “Goliath,” for instance, a rhythmic piece of indie rock with a dripping wet strummed guitar and a hypnotic vocal delivery. Over the course of the track’s runtime, the melody accumulates elements — plucked out piano notes, overdriven guitar licks, an increasingly sloshy drum part — until it feels almost relentless, an avalanche that picks up speed and mass as it travels downhill until the increasingly rapturous lyrical refrain, “you will be crushed by Goliath” starts to feel like an imminent danger.
Not all of the various layers of The Holes That House the Seeds are as fantastically noisy as they are in “Goliath,” of course. This album revels in its quieter moments too, in the relatively more subdued and mournful tracks that comprise the body of the album, building interest instead through an array of auxiliary percussion or even just the small choices in effects and dynamics made throughout, a bass that occasionally throbs to the front of the mix before melting back into the rhythm, for example. Frequently the tracks do both, inviting you closer with a bittersweet string melody before crushing you beneath a lyrical and sonic weight. The overall effect is incredibly rich, baroque, even, in the vein of 90s alt greats like Yo La Tengo, Wilco, or even Neutral Milk Hotel. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the album’s final track, “Broken Hearts Like Spells,” a 15-minute-long journey through accumulating layers that build and build until the listener is awash with strings, cymbals, tambourines, horns, shrieks and wails, and more, a triumphant if not slightly chaotic wall that could have just as believably been recorded by a whole damn orchestra.
The Holes That House the Seeds is one of those albums that rewards repeat listeners with new and surprising elements lurking just below the surface. But, happily, it is also an album that rewards first time listeners too, those disparate layers bleeding together into a coherent, singular album that is in equal measure moody and joyous, quiet and overwhelming. If you’re a fan of indie music in any capacity, I highly recommend Blood At Ease.
