From Review: Buried Blood at Tube, Oct. 30, 2006 (JASON SIMMS - wweek.com)

In a few months, Buried Blood is going to release their debut album (which will most likely rule), so I’m generally holding my tongue on them for a proper profile at that point. But something has to be said straight away about a band that brought the rock that hard to Tube.

Jesse, the group’s drummer, was dressed as a bloody, crown-of-thorns Jesus and looked exactly him. Watching Jesus’ hair fly all over the place during alternating top-notch and original classic rock fills and double bass insanity gave me joy only topped by hearing him scream at the same time.

This display of sacrilege and percussive virtuosity alone ought to have been enough to cloud the validity of Salina Nuñez’s Mercury preview of the show which claimed that BB would be “just another basement metal band” if it weren’t vocalist Xtine’s skill. But Jesus aside, my face actually hurts today from grinning during guitarist Robbie’s completely unnecessarily long and fuckin’ bad ass guitar solos. And I wasn’t alone: One fan wildly ran up and stared at Robbie from a few inches away in disbelief. Bass-playin’ Becca did a good job of holding everything together while Robbie and his fans were losing their minds.

So anyway, I think the instrumentalists of Buried Blood would have put on a hell of a show on their own. If they’re not the most original-sounding band, they’ve certainly got enough heart and skill to hold my attention and to be worthy of a characteristically rockin’ Monday night at Tube. But I am in agreement with Nuñez on the subject of Xtine. Her voice sounds like a guitar with a hint of old school fuzz nearly blowing a tube amp. It’s smooth, mid-range and very, very rich. What’s more, Xtine is a true performer. She slowly built the crowd up to the power harnessing level achieved by tirelessly charging them and holding dramatic poses. By the group’s closer, the bi-polar, up- and down-tempo “Eternal Void,” some folks were skipping out because they couldn’t handle the insanity. Xtine’s band fully matched the intensity level she worked to build, leaving my jaw dropped as Jesse hit the final cymbal.