Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been responsible for some of my favorite music for years, but Big Blood is a significantly weirder, more unpredictable, and prickly entity than the duo's previous outlet, Fire on Fire. While they are almost always compelling and distinctive, Big Blood's voluminous output, occasional shrillness, general inscrutability, and stylistic variability can make them a hard band to fully embrace. Fortunately, this gorgeous double LP captures captures Colleen and Caleb at their absolute best, occupying the bizarre, lonely nexus where Appalachian folk, ritual, sound art, vintage Egyptian pop, and deep psychedelia intersect.
This seems to be loose concept album of sorts, as the title and many of the songs make allusions to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian classic We, a novel that I have embarrassingly not yet read. Fortunately, my egregious literary ignorance does not inhibit my enjoyment of this effort at all, aside from perhaps making an already cryptic, arcane album slightly more so. Possible deeper meaning aside, Radio Valkyrie certainly sounds a lot like an otherworldly, late-night radio transmission, which is both thematically appropriate and eerily evocative. In some cases, that resemblance is quite overt, as swooping shortwave radio-like feedback appears in several songs (most prominently in "Into the Wild, Part I") and there are a few ominous, tinny interludes on the first record that sound like a distant, distorted signal pregnant with menace. In other cases, the effect is achieved more subtly, as these songs all share a deeply hallucinatory, nocturnal feel.
Stylistically, however, Radio Valkyrie is all over the map, as the sole constant thread seems to be Colleen Kinsella's ragged, unusual vocals (usually heard though a thin haze of static or distortion). As much as I enjoy Caleb's own unique vocals (sort of a strangled hillbilly yelp), it is fitting that only Colleen sings here, as her Siren-esque, force-of-nature vocals are ideally suited for such a hazily unearthly suite of songs. Or, more accurately, "songs." Despite being a double album, there are very few conventionally structured songs here, particularly on the second album: Radio Valkyrie leans very heavily on abstract collages and droning soundscapes. Fortunately, the few songs that do appear are almost invariably excellent and the surrounding instrumental interludes are so effectively moody and surreal that they could easily carry an album on their own.
The best pieces, of course, are the ones that sound like absolutely no one else. The most striking of those is probably "Sanati," which seems to be a Layla Murad (or Leila Mourad) cover of sorts, though translations vary and I cannot read Arabic well enough to confirm that (or at all, actually). Regardless, I am sure it sounds nothing like the original, as this version is built upon little more than hollow, funeral procession percussion, a haze of uneasy feedback, and Kinsella's possessed-sounding wails and chants. "Sirens Knell, Part II," for its part, is even more brilliantly warped, sounding like an unholy collision of torch song; eerily dissonant Natural Snow Buildings-style flutes; backwards, wrong-sounding guitars; and a malfunctioning gramophone.
Of course, Radio Valkyrie is not without its flaws, but this is probably as close to a perfect album as anyone could expect from Big Blood and the "flaws" in question are mostly relative. For example, the opening "40 Days and 40 Nights" would probably be a highlight on any other album, but sounds too conventionally "Big Blood" to fit on such an otherwise ambitiously mind-bending effort as this one. I had a similar issue with the somewhat shrill sludge rock of "Everything is Improving." It is not necessarily weak, but this is just not the ideal place for a stomping "rock" song with snarling wah-wah guitar. Conversely, however, there is absolutely no filler to be found anywhere and the two records are otherwise thoroughly unique, wonderful, coherent, immersive, complex, haunted-sounding, and totally brain-melting, which renders any minor wobbles fairly irrelevant. This is the album I have been waiting for from Caleb and Colleen: Radio Valkyrie is Big Blood's masterpiece.
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