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Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Given Big Blood's relative obscurity to a general listener, plus their ridiculously expansive musical output, I'm providing my own "beginner's guide" to the band's music. I offer this primarily to assist a prospective Good Article reviewer, but also to anyone interested in sampling their music.
If you're considering reviewing this article as a GA reviewer, please know I have no expectation that you listen to even a second of their music if you aren't interested. The article should stand on its own merits regardless of your personal familiarity or enjoyment. Nonetheless, I hope this helps make the subject matter more approachable and comprehensible to whoever might come along. And hey, I do hope you enjoy the discovery—if Big Blood is new to you and happens to be to your taste, great!
The 20-song selection below is a balance between some of my own personal favorites, plus songs that that (I think) help present a reasonably balanced overview of the band's career and sound. I've made three groupings spanning the same blocks of time as the major subsections in the article. I haven't heard everything the band ever recorded, so take this with a grain of salt. It's a product of my own blindspots (deafspots?), subjective biases, and arbitrary curatorial choices.
"Insecure Kids" – 5:11 – from Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? (2020)
P.S.: To my ears, Space Gallery (2007) is my personal favorite Big Blod album, so if you'd prefer a single album over a mix, try that one. If you're pressed for time, the first track above—"Oh Country (Skin & Bones)"—is about as beautiful and accessible as they get. Thanks! —blz 2049➠ ❏03:47, 23 November 2021 (UTC)Reply
Kinsella said they had been motivated to provide highly personalized material at little expense to either themselves or the purchaser – I don't understand this: Why would they provide this to themselves, and why would that be relevant?
I reworded it for clarity: "Kinsella said they wanted to provide packaging artwork that was personalized, yet inexpensive to produce or purchase." To be totally clear about the underlying meaning: ordinarily, it might be assumed that a personalized, unique "limited edition" of a DIY musical release .
According to The Brooklyn Rail's Christopher Nelson, Space Gallery "must be considered one of Big Blood's high points" – You never mention what Space Gallery is. Maybe introduce this album first, or at least say "the album Space Gallery"?
Good catch; I fixed that.
In the mid-2000s, Kinsella and Mulkerin lived in a house near oil tanks in South Portland, Maine, – Any particular reason why the surroundings of their house are interesting here? Did this influence their music in some way?
I've never visited Portland, Maine, and I imagine it's an unfamiliar place to most readers, whether they've ever lived in the US or not. The detail about residing near oil tanks in South Portland provides context about the band's locale and socioeconomic circumstances at the time of its formation. It also provides richer local context for those who do live in Maine.
Why is the image "Michael Gira performing with Swans in 2012" relevant? Seems somehow without connection to the text. Him performing with Swans is not even mentioned in the text.
Mentioning Gira by individual name is not strictly necessary or directly relevant, and the caption could just say "Swans in 2012, the same year Big Blood featured on the Swans' album The Seer". More broadly, the relevance is that The Seer is the most prominent album by the most prominent artist Big Blood ever worked with, a connection worth highlighting for the general reader with a visual. In that photo, Swans were touring to promote the same album Big Blood participated in recording, so historically speaking the photo is contemporaneous with the Big Blood collaboration and is more relevant/apropos/illustrative on those grounds.
The infobox says: Past members Shon Mahoney. The text doesn't say he was a "member", just that he joint in for two records as drummer. That doesn't make him a member necessarily. Can you provide a source for this?
Fundamentally, there is no formal answer to "who has been a 'member' of the band Big Blood", as there is no "official" list out there. I used ordinary heuristics to determine the band's membership. I included Shon Mahoney on the list of past members because, whenever he recorded or performed with Big Blood, the release was attributed to simply "Big Blood"—never "Big Blood with Shon Mahoney" or another alternate name. By contrast, when Tom Kovacevic, Micah Blue Smaldone, and Kelly Nesbitt joined Big Blood to record in 2008, both the album title and the artist credit were "Big Blood & the Bleedin' Hearts", as in "Big Blood featuring a Backing Band". The same thing happened with the 2012 record Micah Blue Smaldone / Big Blood: a musician joined, and the credit changed to distinguish the project from "Big Blood". By that reasoning, anyone credited on a Big Blood record qualifies as a Big Blood "member", which is a pretty normal standard for determining a band's membership (unless contradicted by more detailed information from sources). Mahoney has also performed as a member of Big Blood during Big Blood live shows, including their tour in Europe; by comparison, Pat Smear—who was only ever a touring member of Nirvana—is uncontroversially regarded as "a member of Nirvana".
The text contains quite some information on the associated acts, which is not strictly pertinent to this article. However, I can see the point for including them as this gives a bit more context, so that is ok I think.
I'm glad you feel this way, and I understand your initial impulse. Normally, a lot of the info I included in the article would be found in smaller articles about an individual album, but few if any individual Big Blood albums are noteworthy enough to stand as their own separate article. At the same time, I wanted to provide as comprehensive of an overview of the band's history as possible, given the available source material.
