The Blood Brothers: Burn Piano Island, Burn : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Too complicated to be hardcore punk and too hardcore to be emo, the raw major-label debut from Seattle's Blood Brothers is the most discordant, unlikely production yet from new-metal guru Ross Robinson. Burn, Piano Island, Burn sounds like those arty outsiders from your high school, hopped up on Ritalin and chained to a feedback machine. The Bloods are on the corny end of the avant-garde: On one song they yelp, "My lungs are hanging from a telephone wire/Choking on the broken digits of a dial tone." Frontmen Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie prefer emoting to enunciating; they trade solely in a currency of loose-cannon shrieks and jagged vocal refrains. The music has a similar disregard for consistent tempos and arrangements. It all seems spazzy, but it's actually meticulous and crisply rendered: order through chaos.

JON CARAMANICA
(From RS 923, May 29, 2003)