Free Blood
The Singles
DFA Records
By Jose Fritz
Please recall for today’s reading, Leviticus 17:11, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood”
The greatest beats have already been made. Those drop-dead, bad-ass, chicken fried funk tunes have already won our hearts and only left us things to aspire to. The singer rips into the chorus in his best falsetto over that ridiculous downbeat breakdown. The horn section hits the off beat four times and then the band comes back around to the verse completing the exorcism. In an interview earlier this year, John Pugh admitted that when he met James Brown he actually kissed the man’s feet. I believe it.
Free Blood takes that feeling, that catch and release feeling, that beans and rice feeling, that Billy Cobham Spectrum feeling, that baby mama drama feeling, that cops flashlight in the morning feeling, that Bill Doggett is alive and well feeling, that viva la ghetto-tech feeling, taking them all and slathering them in a gritty coating of noise and drags it out to the dance floor by its ear. That’s everyone in the room, even the bartender, even the merch girl, and the doorman. Snap, stomp, clap and the big 24-inch bass drum sounds impossibly big even beside the glitchiest beats.
John Pugh used to be the singer for !!! back in the early part of 2007. It was a brief and unremarkable tenure. Even we the critics, obliged to divine potential and pap were caught unawares. You can’t drop the needle if you can’t see the groove. So that series of 12-inch singles that Free Blood slipped under the door in Brooklyn came as a total surprise.
A series of drum machines died inconveniently and their songs had to be written and revised and rewritten, and then lost, only to be rewritten and revised yet again. The process is painful and dispiriting, but goddamn it builds character. It’s a laborious editing process that forces one to try new ideas with each draft, and that they did.
Free Blood came on like drunken sex in a darkened room: mystery, intrigue, sweat, guttural sounds, blackness moving in darkness subtly hinting at the motion of hot wet flesh. Clothes or no clothes -- it’s dark inside this metaphor and you have to imagine the rest. The music is lecherous, and the beats are noisy. The post-punk Pugh and fashionista Madeline Davy together crank out inexhaustible repetitions, versions, and perversions. In the end it becomes a record that is all things to all men, as we do all have that one trait in common.
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