Big Blood - First Aid Kit

[Cleveland Steamer]

Big Blood have been doing their own dark country psychedelic gospel-folk creep for nearly twenty years now. Mad. Based around the married couple Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin and now featuring their teenage daughter, they're really unlike anything else around at the moment.

They've come a long way since their early, skeletal meanderings in the early 21st century, playing art galleries and wrecked oil tankers in Weird Maine, evolving into something of a sixties pop-influenced pseudo-gothic band of beauty threaded through with found sound and bird song. Colleen has a VOICE and it soars wi'ye. They also are fearless with their covers – Can, Beefheart, Blondie, Devo  – all apparently untouchable artists, yet they do them effortlessly and with an ethereal confident beauty.

Their 2023 album, First Aid Kit, was one of my favourites of last year, but I've been particularly immersed in it lately. "Haunted" just flies, screams over you with light and life. That's all I can say about it. It swoops overhead and takes you up in its vapour trail. "1000 Times" is like a hand-made Motown demo from a kids bedroom. Beautiful.

I sometimes feel like I should just retire myself to a culvert and let the field ants annex me, but then something like this comes along and punch-starts my coward heart, and thank god it does otherwise what is the point.

Truly something.

You can get most of their albums for nowt on Bandcamp. I highly recommend taking a traipse through their haunted swampy heartlands if you haven't yet.

One from their previous album

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[Kankurette]

For a second I thought you were talking about the Scandi country sisters, but these guys also sound interesting tbf.