The musician collective known as Blood & Banjos is announcing the release of a full-length story album, slated for the first quarter of 2014. Concurrent with this announcement is the official release of a 3-track demo and the upcoming launch of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds needed to produce the album. The campaign will run from February 28th until March 31st.
Blood & Banjos advances a unique genre of music called Blackgrass: a mash-up of musical genres largely inspired by bluegrass and black metal. The project consists of over a dozen artists from across the United States and Germany. Instrumentation includes guitars (acoustic and electric), fiddle,mandolin, banjo, cello, percussion, and seven male and female vocalists. Enabled by Soundcloud, Skype, and Google Sites, the album writing process has consisted predominantly of remote online collaborations amongst the contributing musicians.
Blood & Banjos creator Mike Lindsay and many of the project’s contributors share common roots in Michigan. In conceiving of the album’s story, Lindsay was inspired by a Northern Michigan legend of an ill-fated family doomed by its deranged patriarch. For the project, this legend was appropriately adjusted to unfold in the heart of Appalachia, a nod to the project’s bluegrass influence. The story features the blighted Abram Stone, a once innocent mason who is consumed by the delusion that everyone around him, including his own family, is possessed by evil. In his poisoned mind, he and his 5-string banjo must prevent the coming of the Anti-Christ and the subsequent apocalypse.
Accounts of murder, lynch mobs, and undead love are set adeptly to banjo plucking, 3-part harmonies, and shredding electric guitars.
The project’s final release will include 10 tracks, all of which are frequently updated and posted to the project’s blog as they mature. The story writing, artwork, and other developments are also openly shared on this blog.
Check them out on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BloodAndBanjos
Stay tuned for our review in the coming weeks…