In Defense of Lost Causes, First Installment, With Postscripts

The Blood Brothers
I love this band. I don't care that they broke up in 2000-whatever, or that their singers, when singing, sound like a sonic representation of the most brutal moments from Watership Down, or that their songs have hilariously unsubtle titles like "Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck" and "Trash Flavored Trash." Sometimes, I just need a little angry music to take the edge off my own inarticulable anger over everything that's not right with the world, and this is the perfect band and the perfect music for that purpose. It is the unifying theme; a single brilliant bloody thread of rage is woven consistently through this group's canon. They're pissed about everything, and lyrically run the gamut from the vanishingly personal to the insidiously global, with everything in-between and in a variety of imaginative combinations. Their screechy earsplitting aesthetic is, ironically, in perfect harmony with their subject matter; I can't think of three bands better at unifying form and content into an internally cohesive whole than these banshees.
What does it mean to live truthfully when even identity is a marketable product, and nothing seems capable of transcending the impersonal, a-moral outworking of the inner logic of late capitalism? Well, the Blood Brothers positively can't tell you a thing about that, but as muckrakers, they're as provocative and insightful as they come.
For some noxious obnoxiousness with a keen but screwy moral sense, for a manageable adrenaline spike, for your curiosity, for the sake of doing a hard thing, and for that neglected niche that is your post-hardcore indie cred (Pitchfork gave their first album an almost perfect score), I would ask that you give the Blood Brothers a listen, maybe with the volume low to start.

PS I got a job today?

PPS A couple years ago, a friend and I were walking in the city and passed a guy that wanted us to give him a few bucks and when we didn't he yelled "y'all look the same anyways!" I suppose that is an example of a non sequitur.