Dead Songs

The CD version of Dead Songs is packaged in an identical (to the LP) mini-LP style gatefold covers with clear varnish overprinting and offset printed vellum insert. First pressing of 1,000 copies. Much anticipated proper full-length release from this wonderful Maine duo after a long running string of self-released CD-Rs and a collaborative 7-inch with Visitations. Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been key personages of the Portland/South Portland sonic underground for over a decade, as members of Cerberus Shoal, Threads, Fire on Fire, etc. While those groups have no doubt left an impressive body of sound, the intimacy and directness of their Big Blood recordings take things to a higher plane of personal expression, freed from the group mind/'serious' band trapping of their past musical outlets. Here they are free to romp in their personal micro-verse, following whim and fantasy through the gates of acoustic transcendence. All of the off-the-cuff spontaneity, intimate home fidelity, and deep personal charms of their older releases are as present as ever, but the duo's scope is now focused to a crystalline clarity of vision. Dead Songs is as sorrowful and joyful in its mirrored symmetry as the infinite life cycle itself, flowing on cleansing waves of inner release and spirit absorption. . . wailing fuzzed-up garage folk anthems mesh into twisted poetic acid-folk and drift to expansive melancholic meditations of boundless depth. Two voices howl, swoon, alternate and join; lyrical layers peel away endlessly, tiny amps weep in pain, crude percussion booms thunderous, and ragged, beautiful hooks unfurl straight out of the void.