A collaboration between New England’s Greg Jamie (O’Death) and Joey Weiss (Super Monster, Lazy River), Blood Warrior has roots in high school, where the pair first formed their musical bond. They released their self-titled debut in 2011, and a follow-up, Letter Ghost, in 2015, making songs that, in the words of the latter’s liner notes, “expos[e] the intricacies of melancholy, unravelling its individual strands of sadness, redemption, and contemplation.”
The result is at once ethereal and immediate, elevating emotions such as grief, heartbreak and longing beyond flat tropes into something altogether more moving and strange. Such sensations have been emptied through sheer repetition, the overabundance of sad songs and melodramatic movies only working to render sincere language hollow and trite. Blood Warrior make it their mission to communicate with rawness and intimacy, something which requires idiosyncrasy and invention, a conscious turning away from the conventions of the genre to reconnect with the original goal.
Letter Ghost, for example, occupies an almost primitive space, rolling back the clock to a time before sanitised emotions through a number of traditional influences, from Peruvian mountain music to Native American tribal drumming. As a result, the record feels indebted to the space in which it was crafted, Maine’s frozen oceans and Long Island’s mellow seas and the intricate cycles of nature, where the simple and repetitive patterns hide an infinite amount of detail.
Today, we are excited to announce that Blood Warrior have a new record on the way. Released on Ernest Jenning Record Co., Animal Hides promises to continue their distinctive brand of folk music, utilising sparse (often deliberately detuned) guitar, percussion, harmonium and keyboards to weave a thicket of peculiar emotion around Jamie’s subtly expressive vocals.
In anticipation of the album, we also have the pleasure of unveiling a brand new song. ‘Wooden Shade’ sees Blood Warrior work from a familiar blueprint, a solemn folk song that’s backed by marching drums and winding pedal steel. There’s a palpable sense of motion, opening in a kind of wistful trudge, a half-lit morning daydream where life and sentiment stack neatly into shapes beautiful and sad.
As it advances, the song swells with an affirming air, a rising positivity that’s not so much a deviation from the opening but a distillation of it. Melancholy is once again the principle emotion, mortality an ever-lingering certainty, visions of violence and animal warmth cooling on the ground. But still there is a gladness. Because with ‘Wooden Shade’, Blood Warrior find joy within fragility and transience and the ever-present land upon which such cycles play out. For there is comfort in things ancient and slow. They have seen all this before.