The Blood Group
Everything Forgotten Gathers at the Ceiling
Le Grand Magistery
So many things I love about this record. The classic death-metal-esque running time of 20 minutes-ish, for starters. The name of the band is pretty fab as well, brings to mind so many things – horror movies, bloody noses, Type A, Type B, James Blood Ulmer, Manson Family, mosquitoes, The Beatles covered in blood• you get the picture. Then the pictures of the band on the inner sleeve are just tremendous, gritty Polaroid headshot quality showing washed out faces, greasy hair, piercing eyes, acne and unsmiling mouths. Finally, there are about eight guest musicians making appearances on Everything Forgotten Gathers at the Ceiling, all crammed into twenty minutes of music. Damn. And can you believe some songs came with all of this goodness as well? Eight songs and unhurried fragments worth of burbling, analogue electro-pop accompanied by eerily young and scarred female vocals courtesy of Jessica B. Man, but The Blood Group is just eons beyond all of that ultra-shitty coffee table, music-for-graphic-designers, middle-of-the-road Portishead-wannabe fuckery that I usually hear so much prattle about. For one thing, these songs have a feeling of grim concreteness and immediacy; they feel like real physical objects, in turns barbed and jagged or soft and squishy. It’s difficult to describe what makes The Blood Group great; while a million other female-fronted electronicargh outfits wriggle about on the ground, helpless and gasping like leeetle fish. There’s a willingness to experiment, a sense of being free from the technical constraints of any particular time (i.e. Pro Tools don’t seem to have a deathgrip on ‘em), naming a song “Odin” and then actually making it good, keyboards/organs/synth are clear as glass, that certain sense of despondency that can’t be faked, reality, a 32-second racket to close the record, vocals to die for, lyrics that ain’t like a diary, and various other star-shaped traumas. Everything is gonna turn out just fine.
Le Grand Magistery, LLC, PO Box 611, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48303; http://www.magistery.com
