It's a teetering pail of blood, towering above our heads, as Kentucky band Coliseum lays into it. We look up and there it is, hanging in the kind of balance that we won't put much faith in. It's going to fall and we'll have that sticky, thick red coating us like a disgusting wax. It might as well be piss or vomit, that reminder that we're fighting a losing battle. It's a liquid that used to belong in something that moved, something that was living, something that's no longer either of those things.
It's what makes blood so hard to deal with, when it's seen, even when it can be felt below the surface of the skin, pumping through veins as it works tirelessly. To put your finger on an artery and to feel it pushing past your pressure is sometimes difficult to handle. You'd rather just ignore what makes you work. You wish you didn't know what was going to kill you. No matter what the official cause of death is, it always comes down to the heart ceasing to pump all that precious blood.
Singer/guitarist Ryan Patterson, drummer Carter Wilson and bassist Kayhan Vaziri write these slamming odes to the power of blood doing its thing. It could be that it's causing problems and that it's fucking everything up, but that doesn't mean that it's not still miraculously achieving everything and more. Patterson sings, "We're all headed for the same end anyway," giving us a line to chew on, to put everything in its place. The songs featured on this session passionately shred the facile properties of just walking around and talking shit. It destroys the lies and the bad beats, the fake feels and the weak diversions, leaving us with a smattering of grim truth that's ultimately the same as the stubborn blood pushing against the constricting fingers that are trying to choke it out.