Crimes — The Turn

§ 01The record that asked for patience from an audience that had learned to expect noise

Tracks like "Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck" move through abrupt dynamic shifts that recall the earlier material.

§ 02The Shift Nobody Asked For

By the time Crimes arrived in 2004, The Blood Brothers had built a reputation on aggressive, near-unlistenable density. Burn, Piano Island, Burn had pushed the twin-vocal attack and the guitar skree about as far as it could go without simply becoming white noise. The audience that had followed the band from Seattle and out across the American underground had its expectations set: volume, hysteria, collision. Crimes honoured almost none of that. It moved slower, sat in silence longer, let melody surface in places where shrieking had previously lived. A significant slice of the fanbase was furious. With hindsight, it is the most interesting record they made.

The production decision signals everything. Working with John Goodmanson, the band stripped back the wall-of-noise approach and let the arrangements breathe. Individual parts became audible in ways they had not always been before. You could hear where the guitar stopped and the keyboard started. You could track the bass line independently. That clarity was, for certain listeners, the problem — because what it exposed was a band consciously moving toward something that sounded closer to art rock or even post-punk than to hardcore. The instruments still lurched and stuttered, but they did so with a visible architecture underneath.

§ 03Two Voices, Different Work

Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie remained at the centre, but the twin-vocal dynamic shifted in Crimes. Earlier records had frequently used the two voices as a kind of simultaneous assault, lines overlapping or cutting against each other in ways that felt combative. On Crimes, the voices more often alternate, call and respond, or stretch into melodic passages that linger rather than scrape. Whitney in particular leans into registers that are openly melodic — not polished, never smooth, but structurally closer to a song than a scream.

This is not to say the record is quiet. Tracks like "Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck" move through abrupt dynamic shifts that recall the earlier material. But those lurches now feel deliberate rather than compulsive, and the space between them is used for texture rather than just recovery time before the next attack. The piano and keyboard work, present across the catalogue, earns real structural weight here — not as colour applied over guitar, but as an instrument that can carry a section alone. Songs are willing to be strange and slow together, which is a different demand on the listener than being strange and fast.

The lyrics match the pacing. The Blood Brothers had always written words that read as surreal, the imagery violent and compressed and not interested in conventional meaning-making. On Crimes, the language becomes, if anything, more measured in its strangeness — less torrential, more deliberate. Lines sit in the ear rather than flying past it. Whether that is an improvement depends entirely on what you came for: the album asks you to read it rather than simply survive it.

§ 04Why the Fury Was Partly Reasonable

It is worth being honest about the backlash. The post-hardcore audience in 2004 had very specific ideas about what forward motion looked like — heavier, louder, faster, with melodic concession treated as compromise. Crimes moved sideways rather than forward along those axes, and for a band that had seemed like the most extreme possible version of their particular sound, sideways felt like a step back.

There was also a structural disappointment in how the record's most accessible moments land. Songs that open up melodically do not always sustain the tension they build. The record occasionally feels like it is building toward a violence that does not arrive — and for a fanbase trained to want that violence, the withholding reads as failure rather than restraint. That reading is not entirely wrong. Some of the urgency that made the earlier records feel genuinely dangerous is slower to ignite here, and a handful of tracks underrun the expectations set by the album's better moments.

But the best of Crimes is doing something the earlier records were not. It is testing whether the oblique, fractured approach to song structure that defined the band could survive at lower temperatures. Mostly, it can. The record demonstrates that the strangeness was compositional rather than simply a product of speed and volume — that it survived the reduction. That is not a trivial thing to prove.

Crimes did not win back the listeners it alienated, and the band would follow it with Young Machetes in 2006, which represented its own kind of recalibration. But assessed as a standalone object rather than a step in a career arc, Crimes is the record that took the most risk, and bore that risk with enough craft to remain genuinely worth returning to — especially now, heard without the original argument still ringing in the room.