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By RYAN MAVITY
My Brother’s Blood Machine is a side project that never convinces you that it’s anything more than a side project. It aspires to be a work of overwhelming complexity, but it never engages us on a level where we can understand its story or care about it.
The Prize Fighter Inferno is the brainchild of Claudio Sanchez, leader of the prog-rock band Coheed and Cambria. CoCa itself is a bit of a throwback to a time when ’70s bands like Rush and Yes were churning out epic albums about wizards, forests, family dramas and hobbits. The Prize Fighter Inferno takes a different direction and leans towards an uneasy mix of folk and electronic music. It was recorded off and on for the past seven years, which is surprising hearing the results.
My Brother’s Blood Machine is a concept album about a truly bizarre family who builds something called the Blood Machine to capture the soul when it leaves the body. The main character finds herself encountering this family in the woods while fleeing from her abusive father. The whole thing is narrated by Inferno, tying this into the CoCa albums.
I’d sure like to tell you that I could discern that from listening the album, but, really, I couldn’t. This is an album that sounds like one of those ideas where someone is too smart for his own good. Sanchez can talk to the heavens about what the album is about, but he sure has a hard time articulating it to us so that we can follow it, at least those of us that are not hardcore CoCa enthusiasts.
All this wouldn’t make much difference if the music was enough to distract us, but it isn’t. There are some decent moments here. “The Fight of Moses Early & Sir Arthur McCloud,” “Easter” and “Wayne Andrews, The Old Bee Keeper” have nice folk rock arrangements in which Sanchez’s nasal voice works well. “Run, Gunner Recall. Run! The Town Wants You Dead!” is a catchy folk song where Sanchez shows off his considerable chops. “78” is the best of the electronic-based tracks with Sanchez layering a fierce electric guitar line underneath the beat. But too many tracks are like “Accidents,” which meanders around for six minutes without building to anything. All too often, the tracks lack life, fire, passion or energy.
The most obvious comparison to the sort of music that My Brother’s Blood Machine aspires to is the work of Radiohead, specifically the Kid A and Amnesiac albums. Both albums rely on electronic beeps, spare acoustic guitars and dance beats. What My Brother’s Blood Machine is missing that the Radiohead’s albums had was Thom Yorke’s aching falsetto. Those albums, despite the band’s art rock pretension, worked because Yorke’s voice brought a certain passion and energy to the material. You felt like he was trapped behind the walls screaming to get out, that he really was on the verge of a breakdown. When Claudio Sanchez sings on My Brother’s Blood Machine, it feels like a supremely talented musician noodling in his basement. |
