REVIEW: Bent Denim - Romances You

Laura Kerry

Bent Denim’s debut LP, Romances You, takes an odd approach to its titular pledge. Both dreamy and gloomy, it lures not with demonstrations of fiery love, but with restrained vulnerability. Comprised of frank and sometimes desperate musings (“When you go to sleep / I’m going to try on your clothes / …So I can know what it feels to be inside you”), the songs unfold like a series of hand-scrawled love notes whose potential creepiness is redeemed by its off-beat poetry.

Part of the appeal of this poetry comes from the fact that—contrary to the timelessness that pop love songs often aspire to (and only occasionally achieve)—it feels perfectly contemporary. On Romances You, Bent Denim expresses what’s not readily discussed in art: the weirdness of romance in the age of Facebook, Google, and Tinder. This comes across most explicitly in the album’s second track, “Caitlin,” a minute-long electronic dirge about the woes of late-night internet stalking. The anxiety and longing (“Caitlin do you like me?”) is fueled by the availability of information, including Caitlin’s past jobs and education—but most painfully in pictures of her “having brunch with friends and not me.” Self-aware and unassuming, it recasts the coolness-in-loserdom sentiments of Radiohead’s “Creep” with 21st-century technological voyeurism.

It’s fitting, then, that this album is a product of another distinctly modern phenomenon: the long-distance band. Bent Denim’s two members, Ben Littlejohn and Dennis Sager, write and record between their respective homes of Nashville and New Orleans, sending each other tracks via email. (The title of their first EP, 2014’s Epistolary, is a nod to this correspondence.) Such a process runs the risk of becoming disjointed or sparse and clinical, but Romances You is coherent and, when it needs to be, lush.

In a musical landscape replete with bedroom-made dream pop, Romances You is also surprising. Just when the drum loops, keyboard chords, and synth layers start to get cozy, Bent Denim injects something new into the music. Because most of the vocals manifest as a subdued, filtered whisper (here’s one more vote for a Sparklehorse comparison), the moments when they break out are particularly striking. In “If But For You,” for example, the voice switches between its usual hurried and conversational whisper and a higher echo, bringing us along for an oddly romantic ride that ends in the narrator’s desire to be unemployed so he can “play with your toys.” There are flowing narrative arcs here—albeit strange ones.

And despite the physical distance of its creators, there’s intimacy, too. In one of the album’s most tender moments, on “Off Chance,” the grinding synth drops out and leaves bare the phrase that begins, “I’ll protect you.” With quietly impactful moments such as this, Bent Denim promises that though their music is filled with longing, they’ll give as much as they ask for.  And they really do—Romances You woos slowly and subtly until, by the end, you find yourself humming along and compulsively going back for more.

REVIEW: Advaeta - Death and the Internet

Raquel Dalarossa

It’s rare to see a band hold out for much longer than a year after their formation to release a full-length album. In this age of Spotify and Soundcloud, kicking out steady releases can be essential to retaining listeners’ interest and attention. Advaeta could apparently not care less about all that.

The Brooklyn-based trio have been around in some form or another for over six years (they used to go by Advaita—a Sanskrit word meaning nonduality or oneness—but made a slight alteration when they realized the name was already taken by a popular Indian fusion band). Though they did self-release one single and one EP over the course of those years, Advaeta largely spent that time playing shows, honing their craft, and crystallizing their ideas and intent as a band. They are now emerging as a clearly-defined and confident project, finally releasing their debut LP, Death and The Internet, via Fire Talk Records.

Right off the bat, “Angelfish” eases us into the band’s hypnotic yet clamorous sound—a product of having two-thirds of the group on guitars. Sara Fantry and Amanda Salane immediately give us a nice dose of Slowdive-esque shoegaze paired with all the griminess of traditional rock ’n roll a la the Stooges. Meanwhile, drummer Lani Combier-Kapel’s furious energy drives the song forward at breakneck speed (and she somehow manages to keep this up for five full minutes). It’s a great choice for an opening track and just one of the many signs that this record was carefully and thoughtfully crafted. The native New Yorkers clearly know what they’re doing (for Fantry and Combier-Kapel, their six years of work as a band were preceded by matriculation at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts) and it shows through all nine tracks included here.

Exploring the album, you get more and more indication of the group's psychedelic influences, particularly on “Gold Thought Exit.” Advaeta’s music occupies a space that is saturated with noise and reverb, but you still get a nice sense of the expanse around the sound—it’s lush and it’s full but it’s never overcrowded. The three women share writing duties and also seem to take turns with lead vocals, though many times their voices blend fluidly with the din of the guitars. We get better access to their vocal chops on songs like “Your New Life In Pictures,” in which we're given a powerful sense of betrayal with lyrics about break-ups in the time of social media. Overall, lyrically, we get matter-of-fact confessions laced with in-your-face vulgarity (from “Church Cult”: “You say you want love / Does it give you love? / Does it suck your cock?”).

Death and The Internet seems to wade its way through the mud and muck of emotion—resentment, contempt, and anxiety, to name a few—and finally reaches a place of acceptance with closing track “RIP.” It’s an intense song with all-out snarling guitars, but it breaks near the end and leaves us with a few watery notes. The band “rides the wave beyond” and we're left with a feeling of utter catharsis. All we can do now is hope for a follow-up sometime before 2020.

PREMIERE: Baby Jesus (Self-Titled)

Amanda Stern

Baby Jesus, a five-piece psychedelic garage punk act from Sweden, are releasing their self-titled debut today on Ongakubaka Records—as a person preternaturally drawn to spare, lyric-driven singer-songwriters, I can't tell whether I'm the wrong or exactly the right person to talk about it. Not knowing what to expect upon receiving my copy I gamely, and without hesitation, sat down to listen. Imagine my horror, then, when I pressed play and was immediately blasted in the face with the explosive saw-tooth of noise that is the opener, “Nothing’s For Me."

My dog sat up on her haunches and we looked at each other, alarmed. Three seconds later, I felt a strange sensation coming from my head—was I bleeding? No, something else was happening to me. Was I...bobbing? Yes, I was bobbing (!), and rhythmically, in time to a chord progression I recognized, embedded in a masterful fusion of genres and references. Sensing no danger, my dog plopped back down and we rode out the album together becoming, ten tracks later, quite possibly the world's most unlikely advocates of psychedelic garage punk. No, scratch that. Of Baby Jesus.

Consisting of five grade-school friends now in their twenties, Baby Jesus plays with the assuredness of musicians twice their age, and they’ve created some of the most controlled and glorious noise compositions I’ve ever heard. The nods and allusions to eras past don’t feel like mere winks or asides—rather, one hears a lifetime of passionate listening and devotion to music in its purest forms. There’s atmospheric range in every track, calling up improbable source material: the Beatles, the Doors, Nirvana, the Ramones, the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction, Sal Mineo’s pouty mouth, and Gidget, watching a surf competition on the beach. Despite all these various impressions, though, this isn’t a derivative album. It’s purposeful and articulate, a beautiful homage to heroes harnessed through a unique and original sound.

Recorded live in one night, which is hard to believe given their cohesion and control, the band's exuberance and onstage vivacity is immediately apparent. The album’s first eight tracks blast and flow easily into one another, occasionally sounding like alternate versions of the same song. That consistency is maintained until the last two cuts, the most psychedelic, which take a slow and soft turn and signal the listener to begin winding down. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded a more even distribution of range from one song to the next.

But the songs aren’t the only compositions here. The album itself will be available on a cassette which has been dipped in high-quality (but sadly not real) gold. The band brought in their good friend Olle Soderlund to design the album art, and the entire package has a limited-edition feel to it. It's something that would look good in a collection, regardless of your musical taste. This just goes to show that Baby Jesus does indeed live by their glorious motto, one all artists should strongly heed: “It’s not a hobby.”

In addition to the cassette and digital copies of the album, Baby Jesus will also be releasing a vinyl LP on San Antonio's Yippee Ki Yay Records in late June.

REVIEW: Happy Fangs - Capricorn

Will Shenton

“Excuse me, sir. Do you have a minute to talk about rock and roll?”

So interjects Rebecca Bortman, lead singer of Happy Fangs, in the middle of Capricorn’s opening track. It’s a cheeky question, delivered with heavy reverb during a short break in the sludgy, driving guitar and drums, and probably more than anything it’s an invitation not to take the rest of the album too seriously. In an independent scene that’s threatening to drown in its own self-reference and synthesizers, this San Francisco homebrew has provided some much-needed levity with good, old-fashioned, high-energy rock ‘n’ roll.

Drawing from influences as varied as Black Sabbath and The Beach Boys (comparisons to Yeah Yeah Yeahs are inevitable as well, given Bortman’s gleefully frenetic vocals), Happy Fangs are a distillation of all that is head-bangingly fun. The group consists of just three members – Bortman on vocals, Michael Cobra on guitar, and Jess Gowrie on drums – which creates an atmosphere in which the listener isn’t bogged down by unnecessary complexity. Their music isn’t simple, but it’s refreshingly straightforward.

Where 2013’s self-titled EP was perhaps more of a throwback piece, bringing to mind the teenage rebelliousness of Joan Jett, Capricorn is polished, dark, and demonstrates an originality that isn’t beholden to the band’s spiritual predecessors. “Contagious,” the second track, is the first indication that these guys have tapped into a relatively untouched niche and made it their own. It’s a power-punk anthem, propelled by vocals that range from anticipatory crooning to explosive screams, and the resulting sound is infectious.

With this, plus later songs like “In The Morning” and “Controlled Burn,” Happy Fangs show without a doubt that pop sensibility and intelligent songwriting aren’t mutually exclusive. A healthy dose of lyrical poignancy from time to time (“To love is to have / But to want is too grand / When you know it can’t be yours alone / Owning doesn’t mean / You get to control”) adds depth to what could, in less capable hands, be somewhat forgettable pieces. On the other hand, they can still goof around with something like “Hiya Kaw Kaw,” a song about a metaphorical “vulture schooled in martial arts” that deals with repressed emotion and self-expression.

As punk and straight-up rock scenes enjoy a resurgence, especially here in San Francisco, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Happy Fangs break out to a national audience with Capricorn. Their confident energy and irresistible catchiness seem a perfect storm for people who need a little break from low-key, art-house electronic music. And as with any band that puts so much focus on its live performances, we’re excited as hell to see them at the Rickshaw Stop this Saturday.

Release Day: TOPS - Picture You Staring

photo: Rebecca Storm

Will Shenton

We’re twenty-one days from the autumnal equinox, and I can hear them – the last, desperate cries of a carefree summer belted defiantly into the face of a cold, bitter, inevitable return to reality. Or maybe that’s just the bums in Golden Gate Park. Regardless, September marks the season for saccharine nostalgia, and TOPS’ newest release, Picture You Staring, is exactly what we need to ease into our annual comedown.

There are plenty of beachy tracks, and lead singer Jane Penny’s understated, delicate, and almost languid vocals trip along over the buoyant “Blind Faze,” “Superstition Future,” “2 Shy,” and “Easier Said.” Thankfully, though, this LP doesn’t limit itself to upbeat, daydreamy pop. “Outside” and “Change of Heart,” for example, bring to mind the unironic melodrama of someone like Twin Shadow, complete with 80s-esque synths and reverb.

“All the People Sleep” is a personal favorite. It’s moody, a little dark, and its verse-chorus structure bounces all over the place. Plus, I can’t help but hear a little shoegaze influence, which is a pleasant surprise in the middle of an album where it’s otherwise absent. “Driverless Passenger” and “Destination” close things out nicely, and in keeping with my seasonal theme, serve as a mellow little requiem for warm, breezy days gone by.

Picture You Staring drops today on Arbutus Records, and I give it a hearty recommendation for those distressed by the looming specter of cold weather and early sunsets. Even if you’re jazzed about the idea (you psychopath), I bet you’ll get a kick out of these Canadian jams.