Blood Brothers Break Up

Its true. I had a feeling it was coming down, especially since I hadn’t heard any news of a new album in the works. The band has always been pretty prolific in their releases.

This was posted on Punk News. Awesome band. One of the few ‘original’ sounding bands that existed during that whole lame ass emo thing and on a major label no less. Check out Jaguar Love, Cody Votolato and Johnny Whitney’s new project. cheers for the good tunes boys!

Though their last break-up announcement was later reclassified as a “hiatus,” word has come down that the split is for good now. The band explained:

After 10 years of making music as The Blood Brothers, we have made the collective decision that our time together has come to an end. We feel extremely fortunate to have spent such a deeply memorable and amazing part of our lives with each other. At this point, however, we feel it’s best that our futures move forward on separate paths.

We’d like to express our sincerest thanks and gratitude to all the bands we’ve played with, individuals who have helped us make our records, and fans who have come to our shows and picked up our music throughout the years. Your friendship, support and love hold such a profoundly special place in each of our hearts. We hope that the memories you attach to our music are as fond as those you have given us. Thank you and take care, we’ll miss all of you.

The band found themselves label-less when their former label, V2, was all but shut down in January. The last album the band released was 2006’s Young Machetes.

The Blood Brothers: An Interview with Jordan Blilie

The Blood Brothers were one of those bands I had heard about from Dov at Wax Trax when looking for something more exciting as I was inundated at the time with too much mid-nineties ‘punk’ rock. I first listened to This Adultery Is Ripe and to be honest I didn’t get it at the time. Then March On Electric Children enticed me but I was into Botch and At the Drive In and completely obsessed with Dillinger Escape Plan’s Under the Running Board and Isis’ Celestial. However, The Blood Brothers released …Burn, Piano Island, Burn and it blew my fucking mind. This was about the same time I had started to really delve into the bands coming out of the Pacific Northwest but more importantly I was in the process of trying to find a sound that was unexpected, dangerous and not quite as literal in content as the most of the punk rock I had been listening to in 2003. BB’s whole aesthetic was fascinating. They chopped up their beats, screamed and caterwauled and riffed the shit out of about every band with ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn, their major label debut. Since then they have gone on to do a number of amazing things with a ton of amazing ‘art punk’ royalty in projects such as Neon Blond, Head Wound City, and Jaguar Love. Just wiki them and you’ll see how many little connections there are between the members and a dozen other amazing bands from the Pac West area. Here is an interview I did with Jordan while they were recording my favorite record of theirs, Crimes. This band is built to last. I hope they continue to make music on their own terms. I’ll keep buying it! – I lifted the photo below from Brooklyn Vegan.

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Formed in Seattle in the summer of ’97 by several close friends, The Blood Brothers were and have always been driven to push the boundaries of music. Their first record, released in 2000, was a shining introduction for a band that had no idea what genre boundaries were and crossed every single one without looking back. Wielding insane time signatures, jazz-like chord progressions and intense dual vocals (Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney), The Blood Brothers slowly began building up their sizable fan base the old-fashioned way-by going out and touring constantly.

Guitarist Cody Votolato got his start in indie powerhouse band Waxwing, while bassist Morgan Henderson honed his chops in the hard-core band Nineironspitfire. Jordan Blilie, vocalist for the band, began by playing clarinet in elementary and junior high school, and his mother is even a music teacher for K-12. Jordan says that school music “taught me real basics, like time signatures, notes and how to listen.”

Currently Jordan and crew are recording a new record in the Pacific Northwest in the ‘middle of nowhere’ with help from producer, John Goodmanson. It will be quite a change from their last record, Burn Piano Island, Burn, according to Jordan. Produced by Ross Robinson, Burn Piano Island, Burn, is a blistering example of what happens when rock goes math and gets produced by an industry eccentric. Their hot single, “Ambulance Vs. Ambulance,” is probably their most catchy tune on the record-blazing guitars, melodic screaming vocals and a disgustingly amazing beat make the song stand out as the most mainstream-friendly.

Jordan says, “The last record, I think we placed too great of an emphasis on the technical playing, almost thinking it out to a redundant point. We’d get bogged down with where to go with these extremely mathematical parts, and it didn’t translate well live-half the songs had too much going on. We couldn’t play them without having to concentrate heavily.

“On this next record, we all made a very conscious group decision to scale things down. We wanted it to be about playing and having a fun time, not thinking too much. This time around, the writing process took a lot looser of an approach. Sometimes we’d write two songs a day. In fact, we wrote double the amount of songs in a less amount of time. Working in the confines of hardcore and metal, our sound wasn’t coming though at all. With the new record it’s going to be different mostly because those genres don’t particularly interest us anymore. We’ve freed ourselves, and we’re a lot happier with the recording as well. It’s much looser and spontaneous. There’s a lot less editing of drum tracks. We didn’t scrutinize things for hours and scaled everything down.”

Adding, “It was great for the time. It’s now almost two years ago. Our tastes have changed. It was awesome, aggressive, and the sounds are amazing. It’s very chaotic, very all over the place, but some stuff on there we don’t want to repeat. We’re taking a less aggressive approach, trying to stay more rhythmically oriented; we want to be able to play without having to stand motionless. Not to slight what we did before, but we’ve just grown I guess.”

Dedication, foresight and perseverance are qualities that make The Blood Brothers such an amazing band. To be able to look back at a record and scrutinize something that was lauded by many as a breakthrough, critically acclaimed and nominated for dozens of year’s best lists, shows a depth of maturity and fluidity that translates well into everything The Blood Brothers do.

When it comes to longevity and creating music, Jordan says, “We’ve built our lives around it; we write and play together. When we’re not on tour we’re at home writing, and we don’t take that much time off from each other. It’s our entire lives, if we’re not doing that were listening to music. It’s a dominating force.”

In 2007, Johnny Whitney and Cody Votolato joined with Jay Clark (formerly of Pretty Girls Make Graves) to start Jaguar Love. To date, the band has only released a few tracks for streaming on their MySpace page. The tracks can also be purchased at the Crystal City Clothing website.