BLOOD CULTURES
With obscured faces, delightfully heavy rhythms, and melodies so catchy they get stuck in your head for eternity, Blood Cultures performed one of the best shows we've seen this year.
My good friend, Nicolas had introduced me to Blood Cultures about 2 years ago shortly following the release of their first LP, Happy Birthday. The stars had aligned on that day. Our music tastes have historically been two entirely different entities, like a two-dimensional double helix occasionally overlapping when we make discoveries that strike a chord within both of us. But boy, when it does overlap, we both can't help but obsess over our discoveries. Blood Cultures is one of those bands. And naturally when we got word that they would be performing in San Francisco, we both knew we would burn several bridges and make several sacrifices to ensure that we would be at that show. Maybe I'm being too dramatic, but whatever. Leave me alone.
Listen to this while you read the rest of the article:
So, let me set the scene real quick. It was Saturday night, the 16th of November. We arrived at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco pissing ourselves with excitement. The signature drink at the bar on this night was the Drunk On Me, named after the Blood Cultures single, Dunk On Me, off their latest LP, Oh, Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs (which we wrote about here!). We grabbed a couple of those, and prepared ourselves for, well, uncertainty. As this was our first time seeing this artist, we had no idea what to expect; how many people were going to be on stage? Is this crazy high woman next to me gonna stop talking to me? I wonder what the light show is gonna be like. Or, most importantly to me: how well will their music translate to a live performance?
Maybe the band heard me telepathically (or literally heard me, as I was speaking at full volume, ha!) because they were about to humiliate me for ever doubting that they could perform the hell out of this music in the first place. The openers ended, our drinks were drunk, the lights went dim, and the vibe was right.
On stage, they came out one by one. Clad in matching tweed suits and opaque black face masks, the 4 members of Blood Cultures took to their respective instruments and proceeded to plunge us into the depths of their souls. My thoughts about whether or not they would be able to successfully adapt their music to a live performance were thrown in the trash.
I was blown away.
It was the kind of performance that gets you to fall in love with the artist all over again. Not just because it sounded good, but the energy put into the performance, their stage presence, and audience engagement all came together to fuck you up. In a good way. It's the way this music is meant to be listened to.
Their set included a solid mix of tracks from both Happy Birthday and Oh Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs. From the sing-along, poppy sounds of Indian Summer and Nicolas' favorite, Phospholipid, or the heavy gut-punching tones of Dunk on Me—It was difficult to pick a favorite performance of the night. But, if I had to pick and had a gun to my head, their performance of Glass was something I'm ever going to forget. The energy, the rhythms, the sweat, the dancing. It was a heavy dose of electricity that manipulates your body to move in ways that seemed primordial-- as if coded into the very fabric of our DNA. I strongly recommend listening to Glass especially if you need to let out some steam.
