Blue Bendy – that’s Arthur Nolan (vocals), Olivia Morgan (keys), Harrison Charles (guitar), Oliver Nolan (bass), Oscar Tebbutt (drums), and Joe Nash (guitar) – initially released weird, shoey-pop, but have since gained recognition for their wholehearted commitment to contrarianism and prankish approach to genre and narrative. Wacky live sets and a reputation for mischief won them a support slot for post-punk's breakout tricksters Squid, finishing late last year.
Like so many post-black midi Windmill bands, Bendy are pushing hard against the ol’ ‘post-punk’ label. Of So Medieval, their debut LP released by State 51, Nolan clarifies: “Genre is dead as far as we’re concerned. This album is all about the death of purity, embracing contrasts and everything being a big melting pot”. Their mission seems to be not so much a stand against derivitivism, as a method which brings a sense of ironic detachment to the elements of emotional hardcore, experimental rock, and post-punk it draws on. Then there’s that hard-to-place self-consciousness of the record: as in, band members are regularly named. Hooks, often very simple and short, appear and quickly vanish, as if alluding to, and then promptly dismissing, ‘song-ness’ – like the quaint melodies of “Sunny” which are rapidly dismantled, or “So Medieval”’s soppy, short-lived opening. Nolan’s storytelling is alternately intimate and defensive, in a way which both celebrates and sends up biographical songwriting. All of that comes together to steep the record in post-irony – in the sense that boundaries between what’s earnest and what’s insincere cease to be meaningful. Memes blur into climate collapse then blur back into kid’s TV. Arthur explicitly invokes this school in “Darp 2/Exorcism”: “it’s the things we parody that sustain our lives, he said”.
Admittedly, trying to place the album sonically is difficult. There’s something of the sly, unpredictable arrangements of early post-rock like Slint, and all the disjointed harmonies and sense of disconnect between vocals and instrumental that I associate with eighties post punk acts. And on top of all of that, the clawing, ragged pitch of emotional hardcore acts like Sunny Dale Real Estate (albeit with less of the emo joie de vivre): audibly ragged breathing textures pockmark “Darp 2/Exorcism” and “Cloudy”. But bathetic contrasts puncture those emotional moments, like ending “Come on baby, dig!” – a chaotic and nihilistic interrogation of approaching death – with the softboi quip “I should text her”. It’s also experimental in its cautious use of melody, which is employed selectively rather than as a central framework. “So Medieval” introduces some delicate baroque indie before pivoting hard into an atonal crunch twenty seconds in, as Arthur intones “no sex...” – a rejection of tunefulness that crops up again and again in the rest of the record.
Like an audiobook during a car crash, lyrics are simultaneously elaborate and obscure. Arthur’s got a weird knack for turning Bob Mortimer-worthy anecdotes into dark Pinteresque vignettes – like the breakdown at the Zara kids photoshoot (“Cloudy”), or faking someone’s death to get free gig tickets (“The Day I Said You’d Died (He Lived)”). As well as the ability to deflect emotion into a joke, like a paranoiac in therapy. Tracks like “So Medieval” and “Darp” break with some pretty serrated emotional exposition (‘they can’t feel what I can ... this thing could kill anyone’), but chaotic instrumental build-ups quickly drown out the vocals. The voice sits low in the mix, and it can be difficult to hear what Arthur’s saying apart from memetic fragments. You get the sense that the point of the music is to drown out the words, that the whole project is a kind of sly strategy enabling a new level of deflection, a total confessional protected by the arrangement. In this sense, So Medieval is also a project that is concerned with upending the accepted relationship between songwriting and emotional autobiography.
