For fans of Boston's relatively cloistered DIY punk scene, Bent Shapes' debut LP Feels Weird is a long time coming. Originally known as Girlfriends, the trio-- bassist Supriya Gunda, drummer Andy Sadoway, and guitarist Ben Potrykus-- has been a hometown hero of small venues and house shows since they formed in 2009, racking up nominations and wins for their high-strung, merciless garage-pop at the Boston Phoenix's annual Boston Music Poll. Aside from a handful of short, micro-distribution releases, however, they were almost exclusively a live act, one that required fans to seek them out in person to get a proper fix. Then in May of last year, blaming a need for change and the addition of a new guitarist (who vanished almost as soon as she appeared), Girlfriends became Bent Shapes. They collected the bitingly catchy punk songs they'd released over their three years as a band and released a compilation called Cull Shorts, a sort of scrapbook retrospective on the Band That Was Girlfriends.
Though Cull Shorts marked the end of an era, its patchwork structure lingers on Feels Weird. Despite the new collection's intention as a formal album, it contains disordered messes of frenetic declarations, judgments, and uncertainties that have become part of the band's character. While incongruous, seemingly unplanned mishmash on a debut would sink a less experienced band, Bent Shapes' honed songcraft is such that missing the forest for the trees is actually a great idea. As a debutante collection-- celebrating the band's introduction to the world beyond New England at long last, something their contemporaries, and they too, until now, have eschewed-- Feels Weird serves as an eclectic, vivid primer on its creators' sprightly misanthropy.
From the outset, "Behead Yrself Pt. 2" establishes the band's innate grasp on the alluring grievance: bullshit abounds, especially in their uniquely overeducated, often self-important city. Drawing on proto- and post-punk influences like the Feelies and Jonathan Richman, each track exposes a different blistering sore; Sadoway's mellow vocals and Gunda's bouncing, all-business ones knock Potrykus off his earnestly charming soapbox in healthy doses. "Brat Poison", the most explicit, electrifying, and outright funny cut on the record by a wide margin, drips with sarcastic contempt as it eviscerates the hypocritical arrogance of loudmouthed local-scene personalities. (With lines like "drum circle jerks" and "Go put yourself into orbit/ where verbose is verboten/ ferocious, forgotten," it's also a quintessential example of Bent Shapes' immaculate attention to wordplay.) You don't have to have spent time in Boston to appreciate its diss-track qualities, but those fans probably get an amplified experience.
At times, their disgust waxes preachy; at others, like on the garrulous "Boys to Men", their need to say something the right way tangles a song in its own feet, like the words of someone who's been holed up alone in his apartment for too many days in a row, and the band stumbles. But for every overstep, there's a song like "Bites and Scratches", a personal and heartbreakingly sweet cut about love amidst baggage, that serves as a reminder that they're also dissatisfied with their own complicity and intimate failings. And even as it bubbles over into excess, it's hard to bemoan Bent Shapes' knack for marrying lyricism and melody. Every song-- save "Hex Maneuvers", a dreamy experiment that evokes Real Estate's aqueous twang with moderate success-- is irresistibly upbeat in its complaint. Their criticisms, on paper, can seem distant, but somehow-- whether it's vulnerable moments like "I'm not saying you need some deep-seated hatred of self/ But it helps" and "I met a girl, to my surprise/ Said 'I'm damaged goods', she said, 'So am I,' / so I held her hand," or the blithe delivery of even the most biting invectives, or merely a trick of the pop-guitar lick-- there's something genuinely warm about them. Ultimately, theirs are statements that both ask for and infinitely reward a second spin.
