If the Eastlake, Ohio, duo Bibilic Blood have proven anything about themselves over the last two-plus years since the self-release of their Z’Ha’Doom debut, it’s that they’re totally fucked. Drummer/guitarist/graphic artist Scott “Wizard” Stearns and bassist/vocalist Suzy Psycho have donned capital-d Deranged as their aesthetic, and on their third album, Blood Butterfly (also self-released), they give their most “refined” take on that process yet – with “refined” in quotes because Bibilic Blood’s primal riffing and wailing is so lo-fi that in parts it seems to barely be there. Though that’s proven to be on purpose throughout this and last year’s Pale Face Destroyer (review here), they carry the feel so convincingly as to be genuinely unsettling. The main difference between Blood Butterfly and its preceding installments is in a more distilled feel. Here the songs are shorter, Stearns and Psycho working in two more tracks into a runtime still a minute shorter than that of Pale Face Destroyer, and though I’d hardly thought it possible, Bibilic Blood seem to be becoming even more rudimentary as they develop creatively. As much of their energy here seems to be in deconstructing song structures, they’re simultaneously building creative patterns in which they work. Still, the primary element at work in Blood Butterfly is how completely fucked up it sounds.

More even than on their last outing, however, Bibilic Blood turn that fucked-upness into a wash of malevolent psychedelia, accomplishing through different means what Midwestern black metal has done for its genre. The production on Blood Butterfly is beyond demo raw, but over the course of their to-date trilogy, that’s become almost as much a part of the style as Stearns’ riffs and Psycho’s deep-mixed wails. Were she screaming, Bibilic Blood might veer into sludge territory, and given Stearns’ past or ongoing tenure in Sollubi, Fistula, Ultralord, Morbid Wizard and others, that influence is bound to be present, but Blood Butterfly is geared toward something more definitively horror-based, and the 13 tracks are beginning to expand the formula. Psycho’s vocals are layered on “Black Star,” and later cut “Spider Guts” (the longest on the album at 5:02) devolves into noise before a guitar-led solo jam that’s Blood Butterfly’s most outwardly psychedelic stretch, perhaps rivaled by the earlier 2:19 instrumental “Acid Eyes.” The growth is subtle, and you have to wade through the intended muck of the recording to get to it, but it’s there. “Black Star” displays some burgeoning complexity in its interweaving layers of guitar and bass (I don’t mention the solo section at the beginning of that song only because it sounds like it might be sampled; if not, it also certainly supports the argument in favor of development on the part of the band). As Bibilic Blood becoming increasingly aware of the sonic field they’re working in, they can only progress further within it.

Read more »

In ways that few albums can claim to be, Bibilic Blood’s Pale Face Destroyer is encapsulated in its artwork. Take a base layer of loose but still colorful psychedelia, and on top of that, throw a huge monolith of stone, and then finally top it off with a crudely-drawn pencil image of otherworldly violence, heads on pikes; the titular Indian ghost straight out of prairie nightmares. Translate it to audio and that’s basically what the duo of Wizard (drums, guitar) and Suzy Psycho (bass, vocals) have to offer. Pale Face Destroyer is the creepiest record I’ve heard since Pig Destroyer’s Terrifyer, and though the two have practically nothing in common sonically, they manage to unsettle on a basic sub-sexual level that is unmistakable. Bibilic Blood’s music touches you in the bad place.

And when I said “crudely drawn” above, that wasn’t a slight on the cover at all, it actually rules and captures what the Eastlake, Ohio, pair are going for perfectly. These are aesthetic choices the band has made. Likewise, the sound of Pale Face Destroyer is rudimentary — a rough home recording — coming on more like an obscure death metal demo played at half-speed than even the relative gloss of so-called “horror metal” albums. Wizard’s guitar is tuned so low it sounds like the strings are hanging off, and there are at least two solos playing out on “Nightmare Bitch,” maybe three, which only further affects the atmosphere of mental chaos and unbalance. “Nightmare Bitch,” the longest cut at 6:56, is my pick of the album. Its recording sound is inconsistent with the rest of the record, but with Bibilic Blood, the less cohesive it is, the better. The whole point of Pale Face Destroyer seems to be an indiscriminate tearing down of convention. If it sounded good, sounded consistent, made sense, it wouldn’t work. Plus there’s crying babies sampled and reverbed, and that shit is just disturbing.

Read more »