Laura Kerry
“What do punk and dada have in common?” sounds like the kind of joke a cultural studies professor would ask while spilling crumbs from a pungent cheese-covered cracker onto his tweed blazer. Or, as seems to be the case with the band B Boys, it’s a question that three dudes might ask themselves while smoking weed on a couch.
For their latest album, Dada, Brooklyn-based B Boys features a mock question-and-answer in the place of a traditional bio that shows Andrew Kerr, Brendon Avalos, and Britton Walker in top form, equal parts philosophical and silly. “That’s a lot deeper than you look,” their fictional interviewer observes, after they explain that their album is “equal parts collective unconscious and personal experience.”
Dada, too, is a lot deeper than it first appears. Throughout the album, straightforward rock instruments play stripped-down ‘60s and ‘70s–influenced punk in 13 simply constructed songs. Most of the tracks are taut and crisp, with repeated structures and fairly uncomplicated instrumental parts. Not always so simple, though, is the way that these different parts fit together. In songs such as the all-instrumental “Time,” the bass and guitar intersect and dance apart, creating off-kilter, energetic rhythms. The dynamics throughout Dada are the kind best described by action metaphors: sputtering, buzzing, jumping. Sometimes the result is spacious and slow, sometimes it’s dense and quick, but more often than not, it provokes a low-level underlying sense of anxiety.
That anxiety reflects in the vocal parts, too. Most of the time, the singer uses a monotone half-yell—signaling the nihilistic side of punk over the angry—but the lyrics convey a much more nuanced spread of emotions. Though the art movement for which they named their album emphasizes nonsense and lack of meaning, Dada often sounds much more existentialist. “Identity seen in a mirror / This body encases all my fear… / Misery, euphoria / Pressures compressing one’s character,” they sing in their opener with the significant name, “B Boys Anthem.” On the closer, they round out the philosophy with, “What a man can be he must be (Nothing else matters) / To scale his hierarchy of needs (Describing patterns).” Much of the album concerns itself with large human questions. What is selfhood? What does it mean to be human?
B Boys embrace nonsense, too, though. In “Fear It,” a song with an uptempo list of worries, they sing, “When I don't feel anything and my mind draws blank / I repeat (I repeat) / Not everything has to make sense.” Embracing meaninglessness is the antidote to the fear and anxiety that they describe so sharply and economically throughout their album. This is the same embracing of nonsense that happens at the end of their fake interview bio, when, in response to the question, “Do you have anything specific you’d like to express to get the fans going?” the bio says they get up and turn on a wall of fans.
Clearly, “dada” is sometimes just a combination of meaningless syllables, and a no-frills punk album is just a vibrant mix of rock instruments and chanting vocals that’s good to shake your head to. Other times, though, it's also much more.