After months of teasing music, releasing a handful of singles, and being a general nuisance on their social media, Evil Island has dropped their debut album, Terraform the Afterlife. As I had hoped, it’s a chaotic punky, post-hardcore, sasscore record, but can it hold a torch up to what came before it?
Evil Island, for those who don’t know, is as close to The Blood Brothers reuniting as we’re going to get – for now. Fronted by Johnny Whitney, the band also features The Blood Brothers‘ guitarist Cody Votolato and drummer Mark Gajadhar, GlassJaw‘s Todd Weinstock, and finally OFF!‘s Autry René Fulbright II joining the band on bass later down the line.
Terraform The Afterlife has all the ingredients to be a killer album: the aforementioned members forming a modern post-hardcore supergroup, Ross Robinson (KoRn, GlassJaw, The Blood Brothers) coming back to produce the album, and a slate of features from vocalists such as Fugazi‘s Guy Picciotto, Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells, and even The Blood Brothers‘ Jordan Blilie making an appearance. So it’s safe to say I’ve been pretty hyped on this album.
Kicking off the album is one of the handful of singles the band released, Melted Heart, which explodes into this frantic post-hardcore affair where Johnny screams, “Melted heart, I came back with a, Melted heart” in his usual high-pitched vocals we’ve all come to know and love, and already you know that, despite the last album from The Blood Brothers released 20 years ago, and Johnny himself being out of the scene for about 15 years, he hasn’t lost it, at all.
Followers of The Blood Brothers will likely know that since their hiatus back in 2007, most of the members have explored other projects such as Jaguar Love (Johnny and Cody), Neon Blonde (Johnny and Mark), Headwound City (Jordan and Cody), and Past Lives (Jordan and Mark). Evil Island feels like an amalgamation of all four of these projects, though I’d say it leans a little more towards those that Johnny was involved in.
While it’s difficult not to look at this band through rose-tinted glasses, it’s hard to escape the comparison to The Blood Brothers, considering the band is made up of almost every member, and that can be a sort of blessing and a curse. While it’s NOT a Blood Brothers‘ record, it certainly FEELS like one, at times. There are some similarities, riff-wise too (the intro to Tiger Baby reminds me a lot of Trash Flavoured Trash).
Evil Island does, however, feel a little musically mature. While it is at times still quite chaotic, it’s a little more held back than the absolute barrage of noise from albums like Crimes. It borders on post-punk rather than post-hardcore at times and this is how I feel Evil Island can escape the comparison to The Blood Brothers.
It’s most certainly a Johnny Whitney project, much in the way Jaguar Love and Neon Blone was, though this time it’s less on the campy dance-punk aesthetic and more on a raw, in-your-face punk aesthetic.
I’ll try to make this the last comparison to The Blood Brothers: One last thing that had me excited was the track I Bought A Spell, which features vocalist Jordan Blilie. While I was hoping for another trip down memory lane, I was surprised to find that this was one of the more held-back tracks from the album. The classic call-and-response between the two is here, but don’t expect another Burn, Piano Island, Burn.
Lyrically, Terraform the Afterlife is as abstract and bizarre as you’d expect from Johnny. It’s catchy as hell, too. The simplicity of the opening hook in Tiger Baby has had me humming “G-G-G-Give yourself away” more times than I can count. Adding to that, the initial part of the line “I’ll bury you in rats, If you leave me rotting here”, is one I’m going to keep in the bank next time someone pisses me off.
Overall, Evil Island‘s Terraform the Afterlife is a great punk album that pulls elements from most of Johnny Whitney’s other projects. It’s a collective of everything he’s been involved in that allows it to stand on its own. I’m unsure if it’ll ever escape the comparison to The Blood Brothers, but I don’t feel like that’s necessarily a bad thing. Admittedly, expectations of this being a spiritual successor to The Blood Brothers were high, but when you sit with it for a bit, Terraforming The Afterlife is a bloody good debut album from this supergroup.
Score: 7.5/10
Evil Island released Terraforming the Afterlife on August 14 via Blowed Out Records.