In a parallel universe—one where indie rock reigns supreme and continually seeks out poets of deadpan absurdism—critics are already celebrating So Medieval like a promising novelist’s debut splash. The blurb touts “a tale of musical ambition and romantic anguish, told through continental capers involving raw halloumi, a Formula One audiobook, and the ‘shitpost sagas’ of once-in-a-generation voice Arthur Nolan.” Our expectations are pegged to Blue Bendy’s chatty UK peers—Dry Cleaning, Squid, et al.—then sharply raised as we learn the band has “coined a formally daring new language,” perhaps positioned “between the indie disco and the next morning’s social media scroll.” Emblazoned on the back cover of this literary-musical opus are quotes from Jarvis Cocker, Yung Lean, and for some reason Zadie Smith.
In reality, the vagaries of hype have mostly eluded this London-via-Scunthorpe band, which says a little about their admittedly niche appeal and a little more about the British music media’s imperiled hype apparatus. Thankfully, the lack of actual acclaim has done nothing to deter Nolan from flooding his songs with gnomic brags, eccentric alter egos, and the non sequiturs that are his loopy lingua franca. Blue Bendy’s debut EP, 2022’s Motorbike, was two years late for the critics’ anointing of monologue-rock darlings, but unified just enough inputs to feel dizzyingly new: handclap indie-pop swarmed by Warp-inspired synth ad-libs and a preponderance of too-online slang. Fretting he might be “the only one swagging in the deep,” in a world “powered by Unreal Engine,” Nolan presented a persona akin to the Wedding Present’s David Gedge getting initiated into Drain Gang during a game of Fortnite Squads.
With So Medieval, Blue Bendy return to the province of realism, using their underdog status as a springboard to defiant, high-stakes art-rock. The story loosely follows a “memelord type” narrator throwing it all in for the band after a rough breakup. His chronicles of misery and mischief can rise to emotional rapture (Nolan calls this “dying on the mic”) or plunge into endearing hysteria, as on “Mr. Bubblegum”: “I can handle being the third-best guitar band in London,” he cries, “but baby, just let me be first at something.” Neither the melodrama nor the hubris are lost on the 27-year-old frontman, who takes a moment, on “I’m Sorry I Left Him to Bleed,” to reassure us he is in on the joke: “I’ll get better somehow/But for now I’m just the boy/You made feel like Kendall Roy—wow.”
When he is not wowing his own zingers, Nolan writes touchingly about life in a band seized by music’s contradictory demands: Success is important because it lets you make more art; art is important because it has nothing to do with success. On “Cloudy,” Nolan dramatizes the grind through a series of absurd quibbles (“I’ve got beef with a monkey account”) and indignant pleas (“We’ve been struggling for miles/Where are my memetic flowers?”) in a tone so relentlessly silly you sense he is desperately serious. The band sounds embroiled in the same scrap for a shot at majesty, sharing the Black Country, New Road playbook of minimalist-classical hooks scaled for folk-pop magnitude. The precious and grandiose converge throughout the album, each part a foil to Nolan’s dual personality. Guitarists Joe Nash and Harrison Charles slingshot between folksy humility and post-rock gusto, while synth whiz Olivia Morgan alternates sly Stereolab filigree with baroque-pop extravagance.
Nolan recently told The Quietus his “favorite role to play is drunken self-importance,” entreating us to take his voluble first-person with a pinch of salt. But an unmistakable air of ambition whistles through the album, from the forthright proclamations down to those quiet-quiet-loud structures and antic singalongs like “The Day I Said You’d Died (He Lives),” aptly described in its own lyrics as “a last big pump for the feels.” Perhaps to cover his tracks, Nolan satirizes this very ambition in such a way that pathos is never far behind. “Joe, pinch me,” he sings on “Mr. Bubblegum.” “We’re in the hands of Zara’s styling team.” Ambition, in this case, to be dressed by Britain’s twelfth-favorite clothing retailer. “Darp 2 / Exorcism” at first sounds like a fatalistic climate anthem—“It’s the car, it’s the planet, it’s everything/Come along if you’re sad to be seen”—but appears, upon inspection, to largely concern the indignity of getting dumped.
This nearly irritating self-awareness—in tandem with a lack of any edifying message—is a large part of Blue Bendy’s unlikely appeal. Nolan’s bandmates have said the lyrics are secretly “all very on the nose,” which to me suggests some of the formal abstractions and mustache-twirling metatextuality might be a cover for roguish misdeeds. But in the yarn of a Blue Bendy song, the cheeky flâneur and would-be bastard can comfortably live under one hat.
At the climax of “Cloudy,” Nolan’s narrator quits his day job for the band and alights on the slightest and sweetest of brags: “Please, for me, don’t cry,” he trills. “I made it all the way up here to the microphone, didn’t I?” Even if Blue Bendy are not to be chosen ones—are angling for little more than a perilous existence in indie-pop’s margins—Nolan suggests plugging away at a dream is a righteous pursuit of its own. This is a nice idea that he immediately flips upside-down, skipping into the sunset with a comically cynical coda: “Write a song, write a song, write a song… to drive to!” On paper, the notion of a Blue Bendy hatchback anthem sounds ludicrous. But as the band settles into its begrudging largesse, Nolan sounds, for a moment, as if he has made it.
