Fantastic Gusts of Blood
Artist: Child Bite
Label: Suburban Sprawl Music
Time: 10 tracks / 30:13 minutes
 
Child Bite hails from Detroit, Michigan, and features former members of El Boxeo and New Grenada. They formed when singer/keyboardist Shawn Knight called up guitarist Zach Norton and drummer Danny Sperry for a jam session. That session evolved into the band’s debut Wild Feast. Since then the band has worked relentlessly, following their debut with an EP, a split EP with Stationary Odyssey, a remix EP and finally their sophomore release Fantastic Gusts of Blood all in two short years.
 
Describing this album is a challenging affair. Take a solid foundation in post-punk, mix in some jazzy horns, add some 8-bit inspired hacked keyboards, and crazy vocals reminiscent of David Thomas of Pere Ubu (sucking helium). This is solidly danceable, experimental but not pretentious, and poppy enough to appeal to a wide variety of listeners.
 
The lyrics are quite interesting. According to vocalist Shawn Knight, he wanted to explore mythology, a long time interest of his, but since he doesn’t know a whole lot about it, he decided to research on the dubious source of Wikipedia. Then he wrote the lyrics keeping it purposely vague. Of course, since all his information came from Wikipedia it was already vague. So what we have is a post-modern retelling of various Greek Myths, screwed up and modified to suit Shawn’s whims and the mood of the music in a pseudo-concept record. To drive the point home the band even dressed up all their friends as characters from the myths for their CD release show!
 
This album is excellent. If you like punk, jazz, freak-out pop, and interesting music in general you should check it out. It’s fun and challenging music. Every song is consistently interesting and the album has infinite replay value because of all the little details in each of the songs. After listening to it for a week I ordered the rest of the band’s back catalogue from their website, that’s how much I like it, and hopefully you will too.
 
Noah Salo