This split LP features new sides of material from Micah Blue Smaldone and Big Blood with a total running time of nearly 30 minutes. Mastered by Harris Newman at Greymarket and cut to vinyl by Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering. The LP is limited to 500 copies pressed on high-quality virgin vinyl at RTI.
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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
This split LP features new sides of material from Micah Blue Smaldone and Big Blood with a total running time of nearly 30 minutes.
Big Blood is Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella. The two have been making music together for around ten years. Today they live together and make “stuff” at home in South Portland, Maine, usually between the hours of 8pm and 3am, while their daughter is sleeping. Since November of 2006 they have released a steady stream of CDr and cassette albums mostly on their own label dontrustheruin, as well as releases on Phase! Recordings, Peasant Magik, L’animaux Tryst, and Cabin Floor Esoterica. In 2010 Big Blood released Dead Songs, (their most widely available album) on Time-Lag Records. Previous to Big Blood Colleen and Caleb were long time members of Cerberus Shoal and are total fixtures of the Portland, Maine musical landscape.
Micah Blue Smaldone is a singing guitar player, who lived and made music in the same South Portland home as Big Blood for 8 years before moving to the northern extremities of Maine. He has released four solo albums so far – Some Sweet Day (2004), Hither and Thither (2005), and Live in Belgium (2006) on North East Indie Records and The Red River (2008), on Immune Recordings. He is currently working on another. Micah has played in several New England bands and collaborated with folks like Death Vessel and Jack Rose.
Big Blood and Micah Blue Smaldone have previously worked together in the group Fire on Fire, who released a 5 song EP and an album on Young God Records titled The Orchard (2008). At the request of Immune Recordings, Big Blood and Micah have combined their efforts again to share this LP. Side A features two of Micah’s new songs – “The Mule”, charged with the tension between one’s thoughts and feelings, and “Tell It To The Sun”, a calm reflection on the perils of cynicism. Side B features 3 new pieces by Big Blood centering around the idea of family past, present, and future.
Praise for Micah Blue Smaldone :
“On The Red River, Smaldone sings with an achy, folk-tinged voice – weary but wise – as he explores a world he sees as deeply troubled but ultimately brimming with hope.” – NPR
“beneath the veneer of dusty Americana there’s a song-cycle carrying a heart-of-darkness travelogue filled with terse observations about the malevolent force within us all that slips off the leash with a depressing regularity.” – BBC
“Smaldone plays guitar and sings with a simplicity that underlines, rather than contradicts, the drama. You feel that with The Red River, he is finally getting comfortable with his folk-inspired palette of influences, stretching them out to fit, and making them his own.” – Dusted Magazine
Praise for Big Blood :
“Hypnotic screeching folk jams and backwoods gems, their songs are perfect little capsules.” - Foxy Digitalis
“wailing fuzzed-up garage folk anthems mesh into twisted poetic acidfolk and drift to expansive melancholic meditations of boundless depth. Two voices howl, swoon, alternate & join, lyrical layers peel away endlessly, tiny amps weep in pain, crude percussion booms thunderous, and ragged, beautiful hooks unfurl straight out of the void.” - Nemo Bidstrup, Time-Lag Records
Not a Major Statement like the albums before and after (Operate Spaceship Earth and Skeleton Dream) but that almost makes me like it better. It's just Big Blood doing Big Blood, and if you like Double Days II and Daughter's Union you'll like this too. Some of it's a little odds-and-ends-y, but Hail the Happy Hourlings is the most magical five minutes they've made in forever. Eliot
DOWNGRADER! BERATOR! LIFE TRAITOR! AGGRAVATOR! (band drops out) Favorite track: too hard to pick, all brilliant, can I choose a transition? Sirens Knell pt. IV > Maybe Its Alright. Grain Sparrow
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