Erik Blood
The Way We Live
Rating: 3.5
Label: Self-released
"Erik Blood's The Way We Live" states the record's cover in the most unequivocal manner befitting an independent - nay - self-released record. The scene depicted is the side of a dark house at night, illuminated by streetlamps below. Most important is the single lit window up above, ostensibly a bedroom. Just like The Exorcist, the movie advertised by the legendary poster that Blood cribbed for his cover, the light emanating from that bedroom reminds us of that room's ability to serve as the crucible of so many intense emotions in our lives- be they throes of intimacy, tears shed alone, or nights spent staring at a shadowed ceiling, sleepless.
Don't be misled, however. Despite the quietude the bedroom suggests, Blood's music is just too damn huge-hearted to be contained in four walls surrounding furniture meant for slumber. Blood, originally from Tacoma, Washington, has an ear honed by time spent in Seattle bands the Mountain Con and the Turn-ons and more importantly and more recently, as producer extraordinaire to local acts like the Moondoggies and Coulter. Beginning with the title track and continuing with "To Leave America," Blood's songs, using shoegaze's deluge of sound, achieve the kind of grandiosity that you figure Coldplay must be chasing after.
What carries The Way We Live is that producer's ear, which enables Blood to beautifully craft the arrangements of each song. Whether he's detailing urban frustration on "Home & Walk" or attempting a new beginning on "Broken Glass," it's the punchy guitar that initially snags the listener's attention, while Blood bricks up a wall of sound behind that. Sometimes it's strings, sometimes it's layers and layers of sighing vocals, but always it's a juggernaut of sound that demands attention.
This decisiveness of sound does make me wish that Blood hadn't obscured most of his vocals in distorted, double-tracked or echoed effects. Were he the world's poorest lyricist, the nature of the songs themselves would make most sound like triumphs; instead, his voice remains most natural on the torchy "Odds For Sods," a sort-of lament on negative societal attitudes toward homosexuality that, because of its plainspokenness, unfairly casts much of the rest of the record in the kind of light where one listens closely for political cues.
All in all, this is far from some kind of local producer's vanity project; Blood is very much an engaging songwriter with an interesting life thus far, that hopefully, will find its way into songs as satisfying as his best work here. In "Home & Walk," a restless-sounding Blood sings that "no city really has it all," admitting that the human heart has an unquenchable thirst that can sometimes get stifled by the confines of a tiny,lamp-lit bedroom. I look forward to the possibility that Blood might take his voice out of a space as small as that and tell us more about how he feels.
by Chris Middleman