I am a fan of The Blood Brothers, I have been for a long time now and my only aim writing this blog is to turn all music fans into The Blood Bros fans.
I first got turned into punk and hardcore trying to avoid the Nü Metal scene of the end of the nineties.
I was heavily into punk rock and I sensed a glam-rock approach with over-produced records and flashy outfits from bands like Limp Bizkit that were a bit of a downer.
Green Day was very big for me those days and I had also started listening to L7, Black Flag and many of the early nineties or late eighties punk/hardcore bands. I remember very clearly trying to look exactly like Henry Rollins, working out at the gym every day of my life. It didn´t turn out that way, of course, but as I dove deeper into the hard-core scene I ran into At The Drive-In who were these crazy afro-haired skinny dudes playing loud and chaotic music coming straight out of El Paso, Texas. Their first record, Relationship of Command blew me away. I belong to the generation that would sit all night in front of the TV waiting for MTV to play your favorite band´s video and then wait a whole day to catch it again. So, when “One armed scissor” came out I was astonished, I just couldn’t believe there was a band that would put together the hard-core, the punk rock and the attitude I was after in one single song. The chaotic approach and the take-no-prisoners kind of live show were going to be a benchmark for me and the bands I started to look for. Napster was huge and I was on a cheap 56k modem all night trying to find tracks since I was living up North in the freezing Seattle while they were playing shows down at sunny El Paso.
One day, the revelation came through, Matt, my best friend, told me he was going to go check out this new band that I was going to love, they were like this local version of the bands I loved. The movement was called “Post Hard-Core” but I never believed in labels, so I just went along with him and boy was he right!
They just blew me away! The energy, the songs, the dual-singer approach and the never-ending chaotic shifts during the songs made me fall in love with them immediately.
Cody was already playing guitars and it was the time of their debut album This Adultery is Ripe (2000). I bought it right on the spot along with a t-shirt. I couldn´t believe the music I loved had their local representation.
Soon after, At the Drive-In broke up into two bands: The Mars Volta and Sparta. I was heart-broken because they were like my idols, everything I aspired to as a musician. Soon after March on Electric Children came out and I was blown away, my hometown band was growing both musically and lyrically. The places got bigger, the crowds grew and they started seriously touring the country and the world. They had made it as the music industry shows, but the post-hard-core movement was starting to fall under more commercially-oriented bands. The Mars Volta took a whole new spin and turned into this Latin-influenced kind of commercial machinery I started disliking and Sparta went on to a more straight-forward power pop/punk rock kind of song writing that wasn´t as chaotic or complex as the music I was listening at the time.
Time went by and I continued to go to their shows mostly by myself as my friends got married, had children and stayed at home more often.
The news came along in 2007, they officially communicated the breakup. I was not heart-broken, but I had lost faith in the music industry. The most innovative acts don´t sell as many records as to stay alive, it´s a hateful fact.