The post-punk influences on Pittsburgh quartet the Gotobeds’ sophomore full-length, Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic (Wire, the Fall, etc.) are literally right there on the sleeve, with its cut-up design aesthetic and block fonts. Amusingly, the CD booklet contains a hand-drawn diagram of some basic chords with a caption that reads “Please don't form a band!” The word “ADMISSION” is also stamped over and over on the credits page, which suggests that the Gotobeds might be well aware that the sound they are trafficking in—dour, self-aware post-punk—is a well-traveled road right now, and that perhaps they think they can redeem their sense of irony by turning it on itself.
Case in point: On the first verse of opening track “Real Maths/Too Much,” frontman/guitarist Eli Kasan sings about a “rebel yell,” a self-conscious nod to punker-turned-pop icon Billy Idol over a vintage pogo-punk beat. He then goes on to sing about “phony fuckers and their fucking bands,” a laundry list that includes “BBQ-sauce garage rock, or even worse: gluten free jam rock,” against whom Kasan takes his stand by “think[ing] about carbs.” Then (in the same line!) he waxes existential: “Am I the only punk that is free?” His answer: “BLUH.”
To a large degree, what you get out of this album lies in what you read into the “bluh.” Ever since fellow Fall acolytes Pavement crystallized the “slacker” aesthetic in the ‘90s, indie rock has treasured detachment. But the most compelling artists subvert this malaise by struggling against it while stylizing it and making fun of it at the same time. Kasan fills the songs on Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic with references to sensations that have shaken him enough to write about them—alienation, uncertainty, feeling discarded after a relationship, relationships as traps (a feeling he expresses with supreme poetic acuity on “Rope”), etc. Sometimes his openness is fleeting, but you still get the sense that, even if he isn't quite one step away from despair per se, his feelings are still eating him up. Unsurprisingly, Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic sounds resolute when Kasan walks the razor’s edge between cheeky sarcasm and earnestness.
But when Kasan scoffs about superficiality—a preoccupation of his throughout the album—his lack of irony becomes damning. “I'm from America, where ‘don’t move on, just move’/have you seen LA? They’re non-living proof,” he sings on the Pavement knockoff “Cold Gold (LA’s Alright).” Admittedly, the song’s title (a reference to Pavement’s “Gold Soundz,” maybe?) hints that the band is all too aware of when it’s mimicking, rather than drawing inspiration from its influences. But the (ahem) “ADMISSION” doesn’t excuse the song’s lack of creativity.
Other times, Kasan stumbles into over-earnestness when he lets his passions get the better of him. On the perhaps well-intentioned but painfully literal “Crisis Time,” for example, he rails against “commercial bands [who] make songs for commercial use” and goes on a pedantic tirade: “Fuck Rolling Stone, that trash rag / Supports a predator like R. Kelly.” A few lines later: “God bless Jes Skolnik / To be the only one who’ll call out sexist bands / When did indie culture accept that shit? / It must’ve been when we were downloading the new Taylor Swift.” A line like that leaves you speechless for all the wrong reasons—perhaps there’s a silver lining in that people may one day look back on it as the death knell for “indie culture.”
Kasan takes these shots with a straight face, which makes you wonder how he measures his own music against the stuff he regards as “BBQ sauce.” The Gotobeds hit all the right jangly, jittery post-punk spots for people for whom carrying the torch for Television and Mission of Burma is a noble pursuit. On “Why’d You?” they show us what the Strokes would have sounded like channeling Wire. This will no doubt satisfy listeners who lionize the movements those bands spearheaded. But at this stage, you can’t help but ask: why do this at all? With band after band mining the same territory, the Gotobeds’ exceptional proficiency in this stylistic area threatens to cast them an afterthought, a remnant of an aesthetic we will have moved on from in five years. This isn’t necessarily fair, as the Gotobeds formed in 2009—before current standard-bearers Parquet Courts—but it’s not like Kasan and company couldn’t have done more to avoid dating themselves.
*Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic *smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles. Nevertheless, *Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic *tantalizes by making you wonder whether Kasan’s narrators are as resigned as they sound, or whether their agitation will win out in the end. That this album never answers that question works to its advantage and provides some incentive to keep coming back to it. But, like barbecue sauce, you pretty much know what you're getting on first taste.
