I did some deep thinking about the name of this Kalamazoo-based band. “Blood At Ease”. When does blood ever ease? It pumps through your body all day and night, even while you sit, while you sleep, while you dream. I imagine that blood only comes to rest when the rest of the body rests: In death. But perhaps in a state of total relaxation, a complete lack of stress, the blood might flow a little slower.
But the phrase itself – “Blood At Ease” – hits so hard that it acts as both the name of the project and its debut album, as well as the album’s final track. Ringleader Bailey Miller presents nine tracks on this record, with only two of them under four minutes and two of them busting out of the ten-minute mark. (The song “Blood At Ease” clocks in at just under seventeen minutes, a wonderful endeavor when most pieces of music dare not go longer than most TikToks.)
It is hard not to point to similarities between Miller and Bob Dylan, especially when it comes to this new record. Dylan – in these later years for sure – loves layering deeply personal and poetic missives with religious and historical overtones on top of intense folk jams that take on an ethereal quality, forsaking all limitations of time and space. Miller does the same on Blood At Ease. The songs evoke God, toy with death, but celebrate the symbols of life, capture the chill from the Great Lakes, and go on as long as they must, ending only when Miller’s voice has given way to a croak, the words have exhausted all metaphor and symbolism, and the musicians have poured every ounce of blood and sweat onto their instruments.
The buzzing intro of “One Track Mind” explodes into an emotional rush, with Miller ending each stanza with reflective couplets (“I’ve been working on changing/And change is working on me too”, for example). It’s an introduction to the spirituality of the record, where Miller pours themselves into everything as everything pours back into Miller. What are we, Miller asks, if not the sum of our parts, despite the difficulty of accepting those parts?
The gorgeous “Sault Ste. Marie” depicts another example, with Miller depicting the city on Michigan’s far-northern border in great detail against a beautiful arrangement which includes strings and mandolin. Miller sings of how the city sticks in memory and in the body: “Like the wind blowing through a dusty street and through you”.
“My Boss’s Cadillac”, one of the album’s longer symphonies at 10:12, details class divide and rebellion, detailing the reclaiming of a car from an individual who has too many and driving it towards a new life, one which previous economic limitations kept at a distance. Miller notes generational wealth and lack of it, as well as the pride that swells when someone gets even a taste of what it’s like to move up in the world: “I’m gonna drive by my mother’s house/So she can see me driving/A brand new Cadillac.” The saying “the wrong side of the tracks” comes up when separating the poor from the rich, and often, rich people are the ones who use the expression. But in this case, Miller is the hero, going over to the real wrong side to take a piece of the American dream.
“Hard To Focus” rollicks over lyrics about locking in, evoking the chaos of the world and the tragedies that happen every waking second: Constant outrage cycles, looming threat of financial ruin, the descent of the world into a reality-questioning, war-like madness. But Miller urges us to stay the course despite it all. A particularly poignant line: “When the gun is cocked and dead in your eye/You may go seeking God for a ride… I know it’s hard to focus/When God is watching you.”
“Death Jamboree” sounds like a hoedown at the gates of Hell, with screeching violins and Miller’s voice high and haunting with words of war and conflict: “No music playing/No songs to sing/’Cept that kill hymn/Death jamboree”. It is one of the shorter songs on the record, but even in its three-and-a-half minutes, it packs a punch.
“Effigy” follows up on the hellish theme of “Death Jamboree”, more explicitly painting a picture of what horrors heap upon us here on Earth: People turning away from bloodshed, inaction in the face of traumatic events like school shootings, and pundits who peddle lies for money and fame. “I saw an effigy burning on Main,” Miller sings. “It looked a lot like me in the face.” Miller sings about moving through the world despite its constant violence, where around every corner haunts another sign of doom, and pleads for protection: “And the world keeps turning away/Lord, don’t turn from me.”
For the next two tracks, we wax romantic, entering yearning territory. “The Whole Time I Was In Houston” details Miller pining to return to a love in Tennessee, singing at the end of each stanza: “The whole time I was in Houston/I was thinking ‘bout Memphis”. It’s a rocker for sure, with an outro jam that delivers an uppercut to the gut. Then “When The World Blows West Again” goes more in the folk direction with a much more stripped-down approach: Miller’s voice and guitar take center stage on the album’s shortest track. It is a straightforward track about heartache: “Way across that great big lake, my one true love lies waiting/And I’m gonna sail her way someday when the wind blows west again.”
Finally, we get to the album’s true masterpiece: The title track “Blood At Ease”, clocking in at sixteen minutes and fifty-two seconds of pure poetic bliss, covering the passage of time and clinging to youth, romanticisms, the fatigue of living, working, and dying in America, and navigating the difficulties of surviving in a world that will turn with or without us on it. The slow crescendo into a total overload of musical emotion carries home the theme of the song: The need to survive, to escape physical, mental, and spiritual confinement, to do anything necessary to reach nirvana. “Let me pave that road/Let me pave the whole damn town”, Miller sings: “Let me pave it bare and true then; let me out.”
After any song on this album, there is no chance that your blood will feel at ease. But then again, Miller sings for a state of being where the mind and body can rest, where all emotion and fear and heartache go to the wayside to make room for calm. Through the songs on Blood At Ease, Miller and the collaborating musicians leave everything in the music, letting no restriction bar them from exercising catharsis. The world in its current state continues to keep our blood flowing at a rapid pace. This album is Blood At Ease’s way of rebuking it, restless for a new way forward.
As I finish writing this, the temperature is 10 degrees Fahrenheit in Kalamazoo and 31 degrees north of Boston, and it is not expected to get much higher in either place anytime soon. But after listening to Blood At Ease, my spirit certainly feels a little warmer.
Written by Will Sisskind
