The following text comes from Zachary Lipez in 2022 for the 20th anniversary BPIB liner notes
Burn, Piano Island, Burn should have been a mess. A new major label (formed on the cusp of an entire industry implosion) willing to spend (approximately) a billion dollars, a big time record producer-best known for Korn and Slipknot-provid- ing months of studio time in which to indulge every idea, and a feral pack of too smart, barely legal punks, all of whom distrusted major labels, had zero interest in the machinery of rock stardom, and had, since puberty, spent nearly every waking hour listening to, and internalizing, the most cartoonishly extreme and ideologically insufferable music of the 20th Century? Granting that hardcore is both a real hoot and, at least compared to the grotesqueries of overculture, often correct in its insufferability, these are not, historically speaking, the raw ingredients of greatness. Rather, all the above should have resulted in an interminable slog of atonal prog, a 65 minute mediocrity that would be shelved by the label, with the band soon breaking up, messily and onstage. That's at best. At worst, there's an alternate, more logical, reality where the unmastered tapes of Burn, Piano Island, Burn are eventually found in Jordan Blilie's space-basement next to his bloated space-corpse, with only a threadbare white belt preserving his desiccated dignity, only to be released by some nostalgia-monetizing hardcore reissue label.

Logic, history, and the universe's natural arc towards crushing dreams all strongly suggest that there should have been only one result to all of The Blood Brothers' hope and hubris: a cautionary tale the band's peers would take secret pleasure in, an embarrassing stain on hardcore's proud heritage, a real (all-ages) shit show.

Well, that alternate timeline is my parallel-self's problem, and he can sort that shit out himself. Because in this reality, The Blood Brothers didn't let logic or history boss them around. In this timeline, imperfect as it may be in a couple other ways, The Blood Brothers took all that money, all that integrity, and (under the guidance of a producer who proved to be more friend and mentor than slick major label manipulator) recorded one of the very (very) few truly great, truly original hardcore albums ever made, one of the few that deserves its outsized and growing reputation.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn may indeed be a mess of sorts. But it's a mess like a first kiss, a survived car crash, a Captain Beefheart album as performed by Sly Stone, or an extremely cool baby. Like, a baby who digs Liquid Swords and The Lathe of Heaven, whose hair kinks and swoops with the phases of the moon, a baby who is wearing a Heroin "Brown Paper Bag" 7" onesie that it picked out itself. I don't have children myself, but I assume this is a plausible analogy. If nothing else, the music on Burn, Piano Island, Burn inspires a certain wild belief in possibility.

The early aughts were a strange, willfully stupid time. America, having gotten a taste of the horrors other countries endured on a monthly basis, was in the full throes of a murderous, poopy-pantsed tantrum. The American public, drunk on reality television and grievance, was largely cool with it. In response, the country's subcultures retreated into nostalgic hobbyism. Even before the internet succeeded in splintering collective joy forever, the youth of America was sweating out a confusion of sounds like it was a job. In NYC, we were all practicing our best disinterested vocals, cutting our cocaine with leftover Gang of Four beats, and trying to convince our sexual partners to pretend to be our siblings so we could get signed to the indie division of Garage Rock OmniCorps.

Outside of New York, however, the kids were absolutely losing their minds. If the scenesters of LA and NYC were rich and over twenty-one enough to self-medicate their way through America's tantrum, the hormonal and sober youngsters in the boondocks (in the fifteen-miles-east-of-Seattle suburb of Redmond, Washington for example) could only mimic it, simultaneously mocking and reflecting the white (nationalist) noise and new Forever War around them by distorting the frequency, turning up the gain, and playing all the notes at once. Young enough to have internalized the metalcore and screamo of the '90s (with members of The Blood Brothers attending shows at the Old Fire House teen center from 6th grade on), smart and scrawny enough to reject even their chosen subculture's macho tropes, and with a forced self-awareness of just how garish the world had become, the kids screeched like banshees caught in a trap and dressed like rentboy mods.

Initially formed in 1997, The Blood Brothers sucked in-like a black denim-clad gelatinous cube-enough stray teenagers to quickly become a quintet. This final iteration of the band (Jordan Blilie, Mark Gajadhar, Morgan Henderson, Johnny Whitney, and Cody Votolato) were, even from the onset, an unlikely proposition. A confluence of chance meetings, combined with an open kindness not usually associated with boys in rock bands, resulted in a collective of strong personalities who somehow managed to subsume their individual rambunctiousness into a cohesiveness that bordered on telepathy. While fast friends, the band didn't so much talk out their songwriting as simply explode it and see where the parts landed. Jordan and Johnny trading lines of high ranged, seemingly spontaneous, sci-fi poetry, Cody pulling out haunted squeals from the astral plane and generally treating his guitar like a bored child fiddling with the car radio dial, and Morgan and Mark apparently on a team-up mission to make the Minutemen discography feel bad for not being funky enough. Somehow, as unlikely as the boys meeting at all, it all came together. If not as concretely/conventionally together as your average Helmet song, at least as together as a ritalin-fueled no wave band with a solid rhythm section, together enough to make two albums (2000's The Adultery is Ripe and 2002's March on Electric Children), which a reasonably large swathe of young malcontents with excellent hairdos and tattoos incommensurate to their ages/backgrounds rapturously received.

And again, it could have ended there. Another Pacific Northwest cult band, full of jazz chords and split ends, to throw on the pile with all the others.

But, in a story as old as time, Casey Chaos, singer of the popular rock band Amen, was given a Blood Brothers CD by a guitar tech. Chaos approached Ross Robinson, the thirty-seven-years-old producer of Limp Bizkit and Korn (and aspiring motocross racer) who was always on the lookout for bands who "brought the fire," and handed him that fire, as contained by a third party CDR. Robinson, through his management, reached out to The Blood Brothers. The Blood Brothers, assuming that the message from the producer of Slipknot and Sepultura asking if the band would like to work together was a prank, proceeded to ignore the message for weeks.

After establishing that they were not part of an elaborate, Justin Pearson-on-Jerry Springer style prank, after Ross, Robinson helped the band get their gear out of New York when they were stranded in the city on September 11, 2001, and after a due-diligence weighing of Scene Politics vs. Continued Employment At Taco Del Mar, the band decided to see what the larger world had to offer.

Therein lies a tempting narrative: The Blood Brothers as an insular hivemind, subsisting on vegan punk house gruel and Swing Kids vinyl. While, in prehistoric world of the early 2000s, the internet was still mainly used for hacking into missile defense systems and makeoutclub, there was still cable television, public libraries that served as more than homeless shelters and redemption arc HQs for the raving Parker Posey population, a somewhat diminished version of SPIN Magazine, and a famously supportive and robust local/Pacific Northwest indie scene. Finally, while no comparison to the information superhighway, the irl roads going in and out of Seattle had been paved for years (at least since Jan 1, 1991, when the Sub Pop Singles Club release of the Nirvana/Fluid split 7" necessitated it). So, lest I paint the band as post-hardcore bumpkins, let's be clear that the boys in the band all came from diverse backgrounds/families that (to varying degrees) encouraged both musical engagement and intellectual curiosity (which, in Johnny's case, resulted in him prematurely having the literary taste- Ted Hughes!-of a middle-aged divorcee) but which engendered in all of them a variety of tastes rare even in terminally online teenagers today.

Finally, in regards to musical influence, the Old Fire House, where parents had been dropping off their respective Blood Children for years, had long been a destination venue for touring DIY bands from all over the world. So all this (combined with extensive touring off the first two albums) meant that, even without the benefit of algorithmic guidance, the band came to Burn, Piano Island, Burn with enough outside inspiration to nearly match the internal inspiration that comes naturally with being young, alienated, feverishly insecure, and having so much to prove that anything you can make that even comes close to expressing it will inherently be giant-sized.

As these are liner notes, some specific outside inspiration should be noted. Starting with the more obvious musical-freak-out touchstones of Botch (the band that had revealed to Jordan that one could sing in a heavy band without barking like a supervillain, and who they'd all seen close to a hundred times), At the Drive-In (the Texan game-changers that Ross Robinson had also produced that was most akin, in spirit, to The Blood Brothers), the dual vocals of local crust heroes (and future Murder City Devils/Pretty Girls Make Graves members) Area 51, and all the skinny violence coming out of San Diego, the individual Blood Brothers' fandoms spiraled out, encompassing dub and jazz (specific to Morgan), Wu-Tang Clan and Betty Davis (specific to Mark), Mick Jagger's pouty grand-standing (very specific to Jordan), folk and Elliot Smith (specific to Cody), and the artfully controlled propulsiveness of Drive Like Jehu and the aggro-electronica of late-era Primal Scream (specific to, apparently, all of them).

What did Ross Robinson bring from the outside? He brought, with the generosity that only comes with growing up poor/working class, $20,000 of his own money with which all the Blood Brothers could go to Truetone Music in Santa Monica and buy the kind of new gear (Cody's first Orange amp) and guitars that more famous, less hungry, bands happily use in lieu of inspiration. He brought in a motorbike to rev up while Mark played, should the drummer seem like he needed the affirmational support of a revved up motorbike. He brought a love for the band that was practically paternal in both its generosity and expectations. He brought an endless confidence in The Blood Brothers that, for all the glam preening and tight-pantsed handsomeness the band inhabited in their stage show, the band members themselves didn't always have an excess of. He brought a Joust arcade game on the off chance that anyone in The Blood Brothers forget that, in Rock and Roll, if you let the flying ostrich beneath you stop flapping for even a moment, the evil knights on buzzards will descend and destroy you.

"Johnny was an architect," Jordan says about the lyrics and singing on Burn, Piano Island, Burn, "and I was a carpenter." His lyric writing partner disagreed with the assessment, but let's set aside for a moment the band members' collective refusal to ascribe anything less than genius to every other Blood Brother musician besides themselves. Regardless of who drew up the thematic blueprints and who put in the nails, the lyrics and song names on Piano Island deserve their own conspiracy theory. On the surface, if we stopped reading after "Fucking's Greatest Hits," the track names fit within the surrounding decade's traditions (typified by The Locust, Botch, the catalogs of GSL, Dim Mak, Troubleman, etc.) of post-hardcore songs having darkly humourous sentence fragments for titles. Whitney and Blilie's lyrics certainly have similar qualities to that tradition. And neither singer would deny the obvious influence that literary songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan (particularly "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall") had on the duo's attempts to, as Blilie puts it, use "imagery to create the overall sense of psychological terror/dread that then informs the politics." Conceding these influences, the qualities Blood Brothers lyrics draw from them are counterintuitive. First, an absence of pretension. Second, their rock and roll classicism. Now, I can hear both the reader and The Blood Brothers songwriters laughing at this, but bear with me. Yes, Johnny and Jordan's lyrics are *cough* ambitious. But the surrealism of the words is telegraphed as being about, more than anything, the surrealism of the words; they're unconscious spillover. Meaning is implied but without a demand of linearity that the listener is just too dim to grasp. It's automatic writing rendered as Little Richardsian nightmare jive. Which brings us to classicism. The reader and songwriters can believe whatever you and they like, but the incontrovertible truth is that the album's song titles and typical (to The Blood Brothers) lines like "Happy birthday gelatins smearing bruises on your chin/There's cake but no mouth, conch but no sound/Glossy skeletons, boy- friends but no friends" are simply "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In the Shadow" updated for a generation who were hip to the fact that when someone "says what they mean," they're almost always lying (whether they're conscious of it or not). For Johnny Whitney's part, he finds some of his own lyrics to be "vapid," saying "we were at a point in time where it seemed like no one knew what to say... It's really trying to say something, but it feels intentionally vague. It's hard to see what the point is," he says, going back to the impossibility of conveying a bewilderment of such a massive cultural scale, "and that's the point." It's pure aesthetic for a murderously facile decade. And I'd add that "vapidity" and "gestures towards vague meaning" are two of the essential building blocks of Rock and Roll music. Once you see a lineage that goes well past emo rhyming dictionaries, pointing out the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am callbacks of "Ring! Ring! Ring out the gong!" is practically redundant.

Because The Blood Brothers and Ross Robinson all had a delightful time, didn't fight, didn't (despite Mark and Cody separately making real vehicular go's of it) die, and didn't sleep with each other, describing the recording process of Burn, Piano Island, Burn in a way that might be of much interest to anyone other than TapeOp subscribers is difficult. But, assuming the reader is capable of being happy for a favored band's lack of narratively satisfying pain, and because, be- fore entering the studio, Ross Robinson took the band aside and told them, "This is going to be one of the best experiences of your life. So pay attention to it, and remember it," we'll muddle through.

Rehearsals for Burn, Piano Island, Burn took two months, at nine hour shifts, in Seattle. Over the course of two months in spring of 2002, the songs were re- corded to tape at Venice Beach's Standard Electric Recorders, with Mike Fraser serving as engineer and edited by Mike "Quizzo" Terry on a primitive version of Pro Tools. The studio was decorated by Fraser with approximately seventy flags, of the AC/DC/Don't Tread On Me variety. Drums were tracked on a rental kit in eight days.

For an album that is, in a retrospect shared by the three other band members, kept from flying off what few rails there are by the rhythm section, there was little sequestering of drummer Mark and bassist Morgan Henderson. All the Blood Brothers take pains to mention that there are flurries and complications on some songs that they wish had been simplified, but listening now it's hard to see what could go. Even the multi-movement, carnival of soul-exorcism that is "Every Breath is a Bomb" has a self-evident swing which carries it from scene to scene, the bass and drums threading around and through each other, pushing the boundaries of what might fall into quirkiness and jerking the song back, with no seconds to spare, before it can veer into Mr. Bungle territory. Robinson was constantly exhorting Henderson & Gajadhar to "bring the fire," and they did so. But the duo also, through either instinct or tastefulness, maintained a controlled burning (as Morgan says, "We had done the work. We could play the songs.") that is so clear now from the air of twenty years' distance, it's hard to believe how out of control the album sounded at the time.

For a band that features two manic-poet dream front persons, one high register and the other higher, both of whom talk about learning to actually "sing" as something that occurred to them around year five of their being lead singers of the band, it's an impressive feat that Cody Votolato manages to still sound the most out of hand on Burn, Piano Island, Burn. The guitarist, having quit school after t-boning his car out of exhaustion from trying to balance scholastics and post-hardcore medium-stardom, applies his subconscious attraction to on-coming traffic to his songwriting on the album by playing every single previously undiscovered dance-punk riff on every single song. Right up until "The Shame," the "controversial" (within the band itself) album closer, where Cody switches roles with his bandmates, exploring his then-fixation with the catalog of Conor Oberst and anchoring the song with a mournful-mutant folk line as all the other Blood Brothers swoop and dive around him. Then a tripod-woozy martial snare roll rises, Cody lets all fifteen guitar pedals that ARTISTdirect paid for have one last chiming hurrah, Jordan and Johnny get almost all the way through a final apocalyptic envisioning of all the inevitable disasters that will befall all deserving suckers "when we're around," and then the album cuts out.

"If a wrong note gives you a chill, and you gasp, and it's inspired?... You leave it the fuck alone. And you comp it in. Because when the vibe is correct, it's in tune with the heart," Ross Robinson says, specifically about recording vocals, but also specifically not just about recording vocals. "So all I had to do was get those performances from those guys, and dig in. 'Where are you? Who are you? Why? Why are you here? What do you want to give? What is this for?""

Burn, Piano Island, Burn changed the lives of the members of Blood Brothers. It transformed them from a niche local concern to world traveling musicians. It cemented their friendships and validated their belief that they could aggressively, as Johnny puts it, "try to not be a hardcore band and still be a hardcore band." With their collective decision to keep Jordan's screaming solo intact on "Ambulance vs. Ambulance," pretty much ensuring that the closest thing they had to a potential alt hit would stay off MTV, The Blood Brothers confirmed that, regardless of the label they were on, their peculiar integrity remained intact.

And anyway, who knows what would have happened if the album hadn't (compared to actually popular music) pretty much tanked. If ARTIST direct hadn't imploded within weeks of Burn, Piano Island, Burn's release, if The Blood Brothers' next label, V2, hadn't done the exact same thing, and if The Blood Brothers hadn't chosen a different producer for that next album, grievously hurting Ross Robinson's feelings in the process (because regardless the sophistication of their art, they really were so young), who knows what would have happened? After all, the story of The Blood Brothers is nothing if not an illustration of chaos theory's Butterfly Effect, with the band ably playing the part of both butterfly wing and tornado. Maybe The Blood Brothers would be bigger than Slipknot, or maybe we'd all be living under water.

Flights of fancy aside, in this timeline, The Blood Brothers eventually broke up, but not before making one of the best hardcore/not remotely hardcore albums of the 21st Century (their 2004 followup Crimes is the other one). In the words of their sweet and strange benefactor, "The pocket! The coolness! God, what a band."

Zachary Lipez, 2022