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Best tunes of 2020: #23 bdrmm “A reason to celebrate”

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From Urban Dictionary:
“Bedroom pop – A genre DIY indie music, bedroom pop is characterized by its lo-fi quality and often contemplative lyrics. Bedroom pop share elements with other indie genres including shoegaze, dream pop, jangle pop, and emo. Guitars and vocals often feature heavy use of reverb or delay.”

From Wikipedia:
“The rise of modern digital audio workstations dissolved a theoretical technological division between professional and non-professional artists. Many of the prominent lo-fi acts of the 1990s adapted their sound to more professional standards and “bedroom” musicians began looking toward vintage equipment as a way to achieve an authentic lo-fi aesthetic, mirroring a similar trend in the 1990s concerning the revival of 1960s space age pop and analog synthesizers.”

Bedroom pop and rock feels almost like a dirty word to me. I can appreciate the DIY-ness of it all and the ability for anyone with a laptop, a guitar, a synthesizer, or maybe just some good software to create something out of nothing and let it loose on the internet. But on the other side of this shiny bitcoin, there’s also a lot of it out there to wade through, kind of the like the explosion of wannabe YouTubers and influencers. Whenever I hear the term “bedroom” to describe the next big thing, I shudder a little bit on the inside. And then, I proceed to give the act in question a chance, because I’ve discovered more than a handful of artists that got their start in this way.

Hull, England five-piece, Bdrmm*, actually started out as a bedroom project for frontman Ryan Smith. Listening their 2020 debut full-length, “Bedroom”, you’d likely never guess it, though both the band name and album title are none too obvious hints. Theirs is a fully realized shoegaze sound, more guitars than keys, and sounding to this old school shoegaze fan’s ears like the brightest points of early Ride and Chapterhouse. Smith put together the group with family members, friends, and musicians he’d worked with before and released an EP that had them catching the eye and signing with the noisy label, Sonic Cathedral. The debut longplayer was released just a few months into the pandemic, when it seemed like everyone would be chained to their bedrooms for the foreseeable future.

“Well, it’s okay
For you to walk away”

The last song recorded for the ten track album was “A reason to celebrate”, which given that these words don’t appear in the song, feels more like a feeling and an exultation. Though it happens to be my favourite of the bunch, it’s not by a long shot. There’s lots of reverb and layers of guitars to stare at your fingers to, crossing your eyes at them and waggling them about. It’s a blast of inspiration to stir your languid and lazy afternoon on a grey day into something worth exploring. It’s bursting forth from the bedroom into that big old world out there, anxiety and fear be damned, and that’s just damned exciting.

I can’t wait to hear what this group comes up with next!

*You can guess how that’s pronounced.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

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Eighties’ best 100 redux: #99 Young Marble Giants “Brand – new – life” (1980)

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At number ninety-eight on this Eighties’ best 100 redux, we have the first of two songs that weren’t on the original edition of this list, because at the time, I hadn’t heard of either of them.

Young Marble Giants’ “Brand – new – life” came to me late last year, sometime in October or November 2021. Around that time, I was spending a lot of time listening to Spotify playlists ‘made especially for me’ based on my previous listening history and after weeding through the chaff, I actually discovered quite a bit of good new music in this way. One of the mixes that I returned to pretty often was an ‘Early alternative’ mix that mined a lot of the post-punk of the early 1980s, most of which I was already familiar with and some of which will appear later in this list. But the first time I heard this particular track, I was arrested by its atmospheric and haunting sound and had me reaching for my iPad to learn who was behind it.

If you’ve never heard tell of the Cardiff, Wales trio before, you could have been forgiven, given their extremely short lifespan and their minimal output. In the two to three years from their inception out of the remains of a previous band to their dispersement to various projects, brothers Stuart and Philip Moxham and Alison Statton released one full-length album, a couple of EPs, and appeared on a handful of compilations. In spite of this, they had a huge influence on a swathe of indie rock, especially on those future musicians that would be lumped under the so-called ‘twee’ umbrella. They’ve been cited by artists as varied as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and Belle and Sebastian and Neutral Milk Hotel.

“Brand – new – life” is track number fourteen of fifteen on “Colossal youth”, the aforementioned, lone LP by the group. Recorded in a handful of days, the songs on the album all range in the two to three minute mark and rely on little studio trickery. In spite of this austere approach, their songs burst forth with just as much energy as their angrier and darker contemporaries. “Brand – new – life” begins with the insistent and almost unrecognizable rhythm of a homemade drum machine, but this is quickly joined by a tight rickenbacker and a muscular bass, duelling and cavorting with the beat. And Alison Statton’s vocals are just there, like a soft croon, not assuming anything, not demanding anything.

All of this adds up to this infectious piece of joy that I didn’t know I was missing in my life.

Original Eighties best 100 position: n/a

Favourite lyric: “And now we are a lonely two / Sit at home and watch the tube.” Boob tube, YouTube, it’s a pretty universal and dare I say, timeless sentiment and reaction to heartbreak.

Where are they now?: After reforming with the three original members in the early 2000s and playing numerous gigs at festivals and the like, Young Marble Giants were announced as “no more” on Facebook in 2016.

For the rest of the Eighties’ best 100 redux list, click here.

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Best tunes of 1993: #14 Björk “Human behaviour”

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Has there ever been a performance by an artist, be it of just the one song or their whole set, that completely changed your perception of them? For me, there have been several of these, some of them introductions and some reintroductions. Björk’s performance of “Human behaviour” was one such personal and almost spiritual experience and it wasn’t even a set that I witnessed live, that’s how transformative it was. I can only imagine how it must been for those who witnessed it in the flesh.

I distinctly remember hearing Björk on alternative radio and a big deal being made of her solo debut album, cheekily titled “Debut”. I knew from hearsay that she had been in a band called The Sugarcubes but I wouldn’t properly discover and explore that band’s catalogue and understand what it all meant until many years later. Many of my friends and passing acquaintances throughout the 90s were huge Björk fans, bordering on obsessive and on my side, I also liked pretty much everything I heard, which was quite a lot given how popular she was becoming in the alternative rock realm. I also remember being super impressed by her acting turn in the Lars Von Trier feel-bad movie, 2000’s “Dancer in the dark”. In fact, the music for that film was also so great that the soundtrack by Björk (“Selmasongs”) would be the first album of hers that I would own on CD. After that, though, her art explorations tended to diverge with my own musical tastes and we grew apart.

At some point in the late 2000s, I picked up the Julien Temple directed documentary on “Glastonbury” at the Ottawa Public Library and brought it home with me to watch. I’d always heard that the British music festival was the holy grail of music festivals and based on the lineups that have graced its stages over the years, I’d had held a reverence for it, always dreaming of attending. I was held rapt for the film’s two plus hours and found myself watching a ton of the bonus features, including uncut sets of the some of the iconic performances there over the years. One of these was Björk’s 1994 appearance there, specifically her performance of “Human behaviour”. It was the embodiment of childlike exuberance and animalistic intensity, exuding both sensuality and innocence. She was pixie-like in a slinky pink slip of a dress, racing and marching and flitting about the stage when she wasn’t blowing the speakers wide open with that unique and powerful voice of hers. It further fuelled my desire to go to Glastonbury (which I have yet to do) and forced on me a Björk rethink. I started collecting her early albums on CD and even managed to see her perform live in 2013.

“If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour
Be ready, be ready to get confused
There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic”

Though it is not the only great tune on the aforementioned debut, “Human behaviour” now has its hold on me as my bar none favourite from album. It was track one and released as the first single and incidentally, was written a good five years before its release, back when Björk was still leading The Sugarcubes. It is synth, sample, and percussion heavy, rhythm as a melody, industrial dance, playing second fiddle to Björk, the voice, the magician and artist and shaman. A song that could grace and cross dancefloors of many ilks, high culture, pop culture, low culture, and everything in between.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1993 list, click here.