The Blood Brothers / Help She Can't Swim

When I turn up at the show and see the support is Help She Can’t Swim, I nearly turn around and leave there and then. The band left me unimpressed at an earlier Leeds show, as I dismissed them as screaming kids with not a tune amongst them.

In the Cockpit, close up to the stage, they actually aren’t that bad. I still will not buy their music, but the new tracks they play from eventual new album ‘The Death Of Nightlife’ are darker and more structured then what I first perceived them to make.



The start time is a joke, doors are at 7ish and the band do not appear until 8.45pm. The place is full of restless kids trying to buy booze and failing miserably.

Vocalists (or screamers, depends how you look at it) Tom Denney and Leesey Frances take up most of the limelight, with Denney’s quite impressive guitar skills covering the simple but complimentary chords and twinklings from Frances sticker-covered keyboard. She occasionally leaves the stand to swing her legs around on stage (and scream/bark exceptionally loud), whilst Denney grates the guitar for all it’s worth. I don’t know what the crowd are thinking; a few are bopping down front but the majority just look to be taking the noise in, waiting for the bros.

The Blood Brothers do not look a thing like their name suggests (thrash metal, long black hair and leather jackets; stereotypical I know but...). Unless the blood in the title is a by-product of all the screaming and the coarse throats inherent from shouting a bit too much. Much in the same vain as HSCS, but with more punch and double the racket (the high pitched vocals this time come from Johnny Whitney, whilst Jordan Blilie provides the lower tone screams), the crowd go insane for these Seattle shouters.



Blilie is amusingly unimpressed when a male crowd surfer leaps on stage and plants a smacker on his lips. I believe their label of post hardcore/art punk is slightly misleading; they are definitely experimental with keyboards, organs and the like but I can not link them to Sonic Youth and the many bands under that tag that Seattle has produced. I can relate them more to the indie wave, though definitely louder than that scene the image is the same. Nu wave punk tributes are there, with the power chords, screaming and upbeat tempo and general chaos.

Tracks appear from ‘March on Electric Children’, ‘Crimes’, ‘This Adultery Is Ripe’, ‘...Burn, Piano Island, Burn’ and upcoming album ‘Young Machetes’. Overall the place is quite full, the kids are revelling in the raucous pit and if your ears are not bleeding then The Blood Brothers have failed you. I very much doubt anyone there will be able to hear for the next week.

FUTURE GIGS

sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.