I did some of the listening to this next album love on headphones over the weekend and some more in the car on the commute to work.
Disc 1806 is…Our Brand Could Be Yr Life
Artist: Bodega
Year of Release: 2024
What’s up with the Cover? It is an ATM. Not an ATM machine, damn it. Just an ATM. Say it properly.
How I Came To Know It: I read a review which caught my attention enough to give a couple of songs a listen. The initial post-punk groove was in my wheelhouse, so I took the plunge.
The review I read (Paste Magazine) hinted at this album revisiting songs written earlier, but I’m not one for biographical background so what you’ll read here are the observations of someone who knows very little about this band, and nothing about their former releases. I’m just here for the music, ma’am.
How It Stacks Up: Bodega has three albums, but this is the only one I own, so it can’t stack up.
Ratings: 2 stars
If “Our Brand Could Be Yr Life” were an actual bodega it would be one where the front of the store is full of fancy candy and high-end beef jerky, but the back is mostly expired milk in a failing refrigerator. By which I mean that things got less appetizing the further I explored.
Bodega is a post-punk indie pop band and true to that earlier metaphor the record starts out with them strutting their best stuff. The band is more post- than punk, with the punk being more the frantic delivery and anti-establishment messaging. The post- part of the experience shows early signs that these folks really know the art of the hook.
“Dedicated to the Dedicated” could have climbed right off a classic New Wave record from the late seventies or early eighties, all the way down to singer Ben Hozie’s perfect but edgy phrasing, like a latter-day Joe Strummer.
They follow this up with the very different (but also very fun) “G.N.D. Deity”. Here we have Hozie’s co-vocalist Nikki Belfiglio bringing a dance edge to the experience with just as much talent and phrasing precision as her partner.
By the time “Tarkovski” rolls in at Track 4 with its rock edged guitar careening around visuals that (I think) are inspired by Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky, I was feeling pretty positive about where this record was going, and yet…warning sides had emerged that it was all about to be deconstructed. Deliberately.
First of all, there had already been at least one instance of interjection of non-musical element (a robotic AI voice at the front of “G.N.D. Deity” saying “our brand could be your life” that seemed purposefully designed to knock me out of my listening experience and remind me at some meta level that this was a listening experience. This would be repeated in various iterations and phrases throughout the record and got progressively more annoying.
Call me old fashioned, but I like to enjoy art, not enjoy the idea of enjoying art while looking at it ironically from an emotionally safe distance. Barf to that – I wanna feel the feels.
As for Andrei Tarkovski films, my experience is they are unwatchable and overly aware of themselves. I’ve tried and failed twice to get more than 30 minutes into Tarkovski’s “Solaris”. As “Our Brand…” unfolded I found a similar experience unfolding.
First was the droning “Stain Gaze” which was some sort of saturated noise situation that pulled me down from the previous pop/New Wave/post-punk energy I had been grooving on. It further demonstrated the band’s stylistic range, but not in a way that was enjoyable.
By Side Two (or Track 8 for us CD listeners) you start getting songs that feel more like snippets of ideas, joined to one another at awkward angles. There is promising stuff in much of this concept soup, but they aren’t explored fully, or are deliberately terminated with a jarring new beat, melody or even a non-musical element.
Bodega are super talented but it felt that having proved they could write a radio hit or two, they wanted to just explore the space and challenge our preconceived ideas of music. At some level I admired it, but it was successful only in fits and starts.
By the time I arrived at tracks 12-14 (aka “Cultural Consumer I”, “Cultural Consumer II” and “Cultural Consumer III”) they had fully lost me. Small snippets of songs loosely connected into something bigger can be inspired (see Side Two of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road”) but it ain’t easy to do well. By the end of “Our Brand…” I didn’t feel inspired, I felt lectured at.
Perhaps the record is best summed up on the lyrics to one of its better songs. On “Protean”, Hozie sings:
“She said there’s nothing
ever new in the arts
Right then I knew we
would start to break way
That thinking is
lazy.”
True, but throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks is also lazy. Disassembling something just to show the pieces is as well, and that’s how the record felt by the end. I fully expect this was the plan, and that I’m just not the target audience for this approach to art. Hey, that’s OK – it takes all kinds - but I still knew that the breaking away was going to be mutual.
I’ll now pass this album along to someone who will enjoy it more than I did.
Best tracks: Dedicated to the Dedicated, G.N.D. Deity, Tarkovski, Protean
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