Ever since Endless Scroll, back in 2018, someone wrote “post-punk” on Bodega’s file and nobody has had the nerve to cross it out since. Talking Heads, Devo, B-52s, Sonic Youth: the comparisons and pairings came in an avalanche, and the Brooklyn band carried them through three records without taking much of a stand for or against.
Why Bodega Were Never Post-Punk
Ben Hozie, the prime defendant in that file, says it without detours.
“I never thought of us as a post-punk band. I just thought of us as a conceptual rock band.”
Looking back over their history, it is hard not to believe him. The concept always came first: the themed album, the absurd scenario, the satire dressed up as play. Post-punk was more of an outfit, the bodywork but not the engine.
With All Inside Aquarium, Bodega’s fourth album, the uniform goes to the back of the wardrobe and we finally see who was wearing it. We see the pistons that drive Bodega’s engine.
An Aquarium Inside a Church
The record came out on 9 October on Chrysalis, and it was born somewhere far from ordinary.
Bodega recorded All Inside Aquarium over a month and a half in England, in Leeds, with Matt Peel (Yard Act, Eagulls) at The Nave, a studio carved out of a deconsecrated church. The earlier records were built almost in pieces, with the musicians rarely in the same room. This time they played together, live, and you can hear it: there is air between the instruments, a group breathing. The mix, in Brighton, was signed by Theo Verney (English Teacher, Lime Garden). Hozie summed up the plan: go back to melodies, be more of a proper rock band. The reference is a Stone Roses meeting Jane’s Addiction, with more riffs and more solos, and it is no accident that Jane’s Addiction have been Hozie’s favourite band since high school. When he talks about something “larger, warmer, watery, and metaphysical,” born of the optimistic alt rock of a half-remembered youth, he is describing the ground where
All Inside Aquarium sinks its roots. The cover is a photograph by Bruno Jansen of a diorama Nikki Belfiglio built inside a real aquarium: the roller coaster of
Astro Night Ride, the laid table of
Pick Up the Check and the church in Leeds. You can practically look at the record before you hear it.
Fast Rock Can Hurt
Hozie’s thesis may end up being the most interesting thing about the record. On earlier albums he kept rock songs on one side and ballads on the other, saving the most personal material for the latter. Then he asked himself why he could not write something direct and painful inside a fast song. The answer is called
Astro Night Ride, written for his mother, who died in 2017: roller coasters were their game, and the song rises and falls like a ride, with a naive sweetness that lifts a little of the weight without lifting the grief.
Olivia, at the close, is Belfiglio’s song for a cousin who died in a hiking accident in 2010, and its hushed, tired singing sends the listener home with the lights low. The rest works on lightness.
Weather Me has a bouncing bass and a voice, Nikki’s, that recalls Elastica.
Literary World, the manifesto according to Hozie, argues that the world lacks not a political consciousness but a literary one, the ability to understand even the worst characters.
Pick Up the Check has Stone Roses-style reverbed guitars and a refrain, “see you later, calculator,” that never leaves once it gets in.
Pile Driver is the dirtiest and funkiest.
Dylan, a Train and a Few Reservations
The surprise is
Slow Train, taken from Dylan’s 1979 record. It was the first thing recorded with Peel, a test to see whether they worked together, and it ended up on the album because it came out too good to leave off. Here Bodega keep the original words and change everything else: the train runs without brakes, Dan Ryan’s glam guitar takes over the scene, and the reverb-soaked voice suggests Jane’s Addiction playing Dylan. It is a gamble, and a gamble that pays. Some critics have found it a generic, slightly watered-down indie rock, and the charge is not groundless. Whoever came for the unpredictability of
Endless Scroll will find a more well-trodden path, with fewer edges and fewer flashes of wit. Anyone with that expectation will probably be disappointed, no point circling around it. Is it better to be a band that risks looking ordinary or one that stays a copy of itself out of a stance once taken? The tour across seven countries in the UK and Europe, with two nights already sold out in Manchester, will tell whether this new skin holds up live as well. If the concepts are strong enough, a conceptual band can stay itself while changing many outfits.
