Peacock Skeleton with Crooked Feathers

It's funny reading all these comments from so many 2000s scene kids just completely missing the mark. Not that I would've been any better back then! I had forgotten about this band for years until I was reading the Wikipedia article on Fugazi while watching their documentary and it mentioned that Guy Piccoto had produced some of TBB’s albums. I wondered if they held up and looked them up again, choosing this song because the name stuck out.

The Blood Brothers existed in an interesting position for the scene by having an uncommon reverence for the old guard of post-punk. Most of their peers seemed to only be interested in the highly derivative and increasingly self referential fashion-first genre that the scene revolved around. Not to say TBB weren't guilty, they definitely played into the whole limp-wristed lanky-guys-wearing-bandanas-with-emo-hair image. But they clearly had an interest in the political and it's pretty obvious it came from the radical left wing punk bands that they were drawing from (such as Fugazi).

The lyrics paint a pretty clear picture of neoliberal capitalist decadence. It doesn't get much clearer than when they reference strike-breaking and a senator killing your firstborn - I mean this made by college aged kids and was released just a year after the invasion of Iraq (the sound of ships sinking also being a loose reference to war).

There was no Left to speak of in the US aside from a very small handful of DSA members in congress, along with Sanders and the Greens with Nader, and they certainly didn't (and still don't) have any power. The most liberal members of congress voted to authorize war in the Middle East and embraced austerity over social democracy. It's a really trite observation now, but in those days it took more finely tuned political antennae to understand that the dynamic between the major parties is just a facade meant to give popular legitimacy to totalized corporate control of government. 9/11 was like stomping on the gas.

The imagery surrounding religion here is an obvious allusion to the Bush-era Republican Party, wherein fundamentalist evangelical christians more or less formed the cultural base. The GOP used social wedge issues like gay marriage, abortion and drugs to get elected and then gutted any program designed for the public good because it meant they could lower taxes for the wealthy. The scenes in the song are meant to juxtapose the moralistic posturing associated with priesthood against the actual function that protestant churches serve in politics, which is to grease the wheels for the GOP and serve the rich at the expense of working people.

The peacock is a stand-in for any political establishment figure who benefits from the system. It’s used in the song to refer to media figures, strike-breaking capitalists, politicians, etc. It might also be a reference to NBC, but clearly the specific target of the symbol varies from verse to verse. The line about angel-bone stilts is referencing the wealth and power that separates and protects these elites from the working people who are subject to the abuses of this political system. It also incorporates a bit more of the religious symbolism, playing on the idea of using religion for malicious purposes (the angel has to be dead to make stilts from its bones!)

"Every apartment is vacant, every home for rent" is referencing the contradiction of homelessness with mass vacancies, living spaces that go unused purely because the owner is profiting passively off of them and people are too poor to afford them. This leads to the question posed in the chorus, "Is a wealthy groom worth all this gloom?"

There are a few more obvious references to the evils of capitalism ("When machine guns come knocking, who's cashing out on your bad luck?") and of course the abstracted chorus lyrics involving tuxedos (symbols of wealth) copulating during the marriage ceremony of the wealthy. There are a few lines that are probably filler too (the gnarled branches for example).

Looking back I'm impressed at the quality of this stuff given the context. They made an attempt to transcend some of the trappings and cliches of their genre and occasionally succeeded, it's just unfortunate that we were so depoliticized that the message went straight over the heads of so much of their audience. It's hard to get over some of the really dated campy scene kid elements but all in all I give it an A for effort. Much more substantive lyrically and dynamic musically than probably upwards of 95% of that strain of post-hardcore.