Feral Children
Brand New Blood
(Sarathan)
Feral Children self-released their first album, called Second to the Last Frontier, in 2007. After signing with Sarathan Records, someone realized that Frontier was too good to be just an album mainly for the local Seattle fans, so the label re-released it in 2008. The release met with a lot of admiration, drawing comparisons to Animal Collective and Modest Mouse for its raw noisiness and primal backing vocals.
It might seem like a lot to live up to, but with their second album, Brand New Blood, the Feral Children show that they’ve got more of the creative lyrics and dark tension where the first album came from. Although Feral Children is five musicians, rarely do all five seem to play at once. Instead there’s a sense of great control, notably at the moments when the lead singer stops singing and yet the sentiment of the lyrics seem to increase with the music. They’ve got a strange (maybe primitive) ability to see the simplicity in complex things, not by simplifying them, but by looking at them in a different way. There’s something calm and knowing in the music, like the glazed eyes of a lion eating its freshly killed dinner, understanding that things may have easily been reversed.
But not all of Brand New Blood is calm, and one of the stand-out songs, “Conveyor,” is a high-energy example. It starts somewhat quiet, but transitions into an intense chorus with a few lyrics that seem to write a whole strange novel – or lifetime – in a matter of seconds. What started with self-restraint suddenly explodes, releasing raw emotion in a fit of artistic rage. On a completely opposite note is the stripped-down “Woodland Mutts,” with a simple wistful guitar line and yearning lyrics with a strange sense of innocence, with lines like: “Sometimes it’s hard to be here, and the rest of the time it’s impossible.” The more you listen to this album, the more you realize there’s a lot you missed and need to hear again. It’s like the Feral Children put something addictive in here that’s not exactly pleasant but that you can’t back away from.