The front cover of Every Single Muscle, the new album from smalltown Welsh duo The Bug Club, depicts a hypervascular cartoon man-bull launching into space. With its eight pendulous nipples, surgically remodeled chin, and miles-long fleshy torso trailing grotesquely in its wake, the monster is a fitting mascot for an album whose gaze never falls far from the human body’s folds, crevices, hanging-off bits.
This is The Bug Club’s sixth album in four years, in which time they’ve crossed the Atlantic so often and built enough of a reputation behind their oddball garage-pop that they’ve signed to faraway Sub Pop. Even with a venerated indie label behind them, Sam Willmett and Tilly Harris have stayed true to their weird vision, smuggling some great singles inside obtuse packages—like a live record as a fake band called Mr Anyway’s Holey Spirits, and a psychedelic, spoken-word-interlude-laden album called Rare Birds: Hour of Song. And while Every Single Muscle may not be a concept album, its focus on the human body is intense and consistent to support a hyperactive number of songs and styles packed together.
Willmett and Harris are clearly uninterested in euphemisms, so there’s an exaggerated naivety to their lyrics. “The two of us have never even hugged/I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with your body,” they sing together on “Make It Count,” before spending the rest of the song admitting that they’re naked and self-conscious, and asking for positive reinforcement. It’s hard to think of another song about sex so completely devoid of bravado. On the squawking and vaguely cannibalistic title track, a rundown of the human musculature is followed by some intentionally immature posturing: “I’m a big boy now/Don’t tell me how to do it.” At one point Willmett asks, completely deadpan, how he can be friends with someone if “I’ve never seen your dick/I’ve never seen your penis.”
Lines like these demand attention because, well, “penis” and “vagina” might always be lingering in the background of pop songs, but nobody ever just says them. Willmett and Harris are more than “just about technically proficient” musicians, as they sing on “It’s Our Manager David.” Ninety-second hits of twee pop and bony post-punk make up the middle section of the record, all built around three to four power chords and delivered with overdriven vocals and feral enthusiasm. Even if they do sound tighter and more controlled as a unit than they have before, The Bug Club still sounds disheveled and spontaneous enough to be mining the human anatomy for one-liners.
In some sense, that’s a misdirect from the band. When they’re not groping or poking at flesh, they’re often crying, feeling sick, or falling asleep. Willmett even makes multiple references to sudden death, and half the time his protagonists are taking passersby down, too; “I never meant to kill myself/I only meant to die,” he sings on “Pretty as a Magazine,” where the bodily fascinations twist into dysphoria. This isn’t the human body as a guilt-free playground. “It’s not healthy/It’s not pure,” he sings on the slowed-to-a-crawl “Shiny and Wet.” Loneliness and violence just don’t grab human attention like nudity does.
The standout track here, by a distance, is “Yours (If You Want Me),” and it acts as Every Single Muscle’s connective tissue. It’s an old-fashioned boy-girl duet, one verse each and a chorus of scruffily anthemic harmonies, and the nakedness goes beneath the skin: “My brain is broken/My body’s a mess/My heart’s wide open/I’m ready for this.” After a half-hour of songs that literally strip their subjects back, it’s a flash of ecstatic connection—the type that only really arrives after lots of awkward, jittery, vulnerable exposure.
