Black Eyes Break Up, And It's Quite a Shame
Sadly, Black Keys still going at it

Once more, Ian MacKaye and his elderly Fugazi brethren have outlived a young Dischord treasure, as Washington, D.C.'s drum-punk collective, Black Eyes, abruptly announced their dissolution last week. According to label spokesman Alec MacKaye, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Jacob Long "is moving to the West Coast for personal reasons, and the band decided that it was not in their nature to do a victory lap."

Leaving behind a lean but venomous two-album catalog-- that is, if you count the forthcoming Cough-- Black Eyes enjoyed a deafening three-year reign as one of the most sonically daunting and unabashedly forward-thinking bands on the Dischord roster.

Forming from the broken limbs of small-time D.C. punk outfits No-Gos and Trooper, the five-piece got its honest start when multi-instrumentalist Daniel Martin-McCormick brought a hefty collection of percussion he'd amassed in his basement to an early Black Eyes practice. Vaulting the gates of anonymity in 2003, the band's self-titled debut was a two-drummer, two-bassist, two-singer wildfire of polyrhythm and cacophony, lung-top screams, and sputtering pulses. But as MacKaye so romantically lamented to the Fork, "The fire that burns the brightest burns only half as long."

Luckily, however, Black Eyes managed to produce the above-mentioned Cough before their sudden demise last week. Set for a May 31st Dischord release, the album was recorded in January at Inner Ear, with Ian MacKaye and Don Zientara behind the boards. Boasting the same "confrontational" aesthetic as their debut-- but with a few more dub and free jazz references for good measure-- Alec MacKaye suggests that Cough will "alienate half of their fans and replace them with as many, if not more, hardcore converts." Hmmm, hardcore converts, eh? Not bad, considering the band won't exist. But, I'm sure just like every other D.C. act, they'll reform under a different name and release another record, then break up again, only to reform with a tad different line-up and release an EP or at least a split seven-inch. So, all you soon-to-be hardcore converts have nothing to worry about. Cough tracklist:

01 Cough, Cough
02 Eternal Life
03 False Positive
04 Drums
05 Scrapes and Scratches
06 Fathers of Daughters
07 Holy of Holies
08 Commencement
09 Spring into Winter
10 Another Country
11 A Meditation

Dischord: http://www.dischord.com