The ousting of Bassvictim from Berghain feels like a Biblical prophecy: Of course these electroclash expats, who fucked around and crystallized a fried twee-pop resurgence, would be banished from the Garden of Eden. Just two years ago, Maria Manow and Ike Clateman were heirs apparent to “indie sleaze,” a catch-all whose constraints, musically and aesthetically, boiled down to “kinda Crystal Castles coded.” Here was a photogenic boy-girl duo with two wonderfully wubby albums, a vague air of disaffected cool, and a very active Instagram account. “I’m not joking/I’m being hella serious,” Manow had drawled on “Air on a G String,” their silly-sexy breakout hit. Even with the explicit clarification, the canon they seemed to be entering—sleaze first, sincerity second—left some room for doubt.
Then came Forever, a cringingly earnest opus whose EQ included a toy frog. (Not, in fact, “glitchy E-drums,” as I wrongly suggested on this website before being cooked in an Instagram story.) Juvenile bliss had long contoured this abrasive band, whose songs rattled like playgrounds, and whose shouts rang like the peals of petulant children. But if their self-described “basspunk” was paradoxical—the digital fwump of electroclash, the raw willpower of punk—then here, it was congealing towards a zany endpoint: ragtag, youthful twee music, seemingly hollered into the first-ever Little Tikes Focusrite. In seeking a musical language for their sincerity, Bassvictim had found themselves fiddling with trinkets and freestyling nursery rhymes. Their saunter down the yellow brick road continues on ?, a low-stakes follow-up with the lightness and bliss of a night out in Neverland.
The title ? speaks to the impulsivity of this record—and Bassvictim as a whole—but also to the many important questions raised here: What would a cooked subwoofer sound like in The Secret World of Arrietty? Would you make it past security if you tried to sneak a Banjo-Kazooie sample pack into a Belle and Sebastian song? “Do you see how I have changed? Do you see how much I smile?” When Manow poses those last two on the 7-minute “Babcia Jadzia,” her breaking voice sounds bare against Clateman’s slight composition, a bass-synthesizer ditty with the innocence of a wind-up toy. The violent earnestness is like a speaker-phone therapy session on a crowded subway. But that’s the crux of Bassvictim’s gelling sound, which reminds me of something Dijon suggested months ago: that more music should be “positively embarrassing,” denying passivity outright. Throw the ever-mutating “Going Home” on your Bluetooth speaker, and try not to scramble for the volume button every 30 seconds.
Even when it was forwardly electroclash, Bassvictim’s music was fluid: Clateman’s deconstructed club arrangements and Manow’s versatile vocals weaving like betta fish on Adderall. Here, that fluidity manifests in bug-eyed quirks, little moments that make you question the song you thought you were hearing. When standout “Sometimes I believe in God (Sometimes I believe in Me)” starts sounding like a carnival during an active tornado warning, the whiplash is cathartic: When did this feathery indietronica song become this fried? The acoustic “Don’t Stop Me Now” sounds like Bassvictim’s answer to “Love Yourself” by Worldpeace DMT, all plucky licks and loving advice. Midway through, when faint handclaps enter the mix, it is both cutesy and oddly moving, like peering through the curtain to see a live audience of stoked kindergarteners.
When I think about the childlike glee of Bassvictim’s recent music, I think specifically of a day last fall, when they posted their location on Instagram then livestreamed the aftermath: a free, open-air show at a random park in Toronto. It seemed an apt representation of their shift in direction, away from structure—genre constructions, like electroclash, and physical ones, like Berghain—and towards entropic, random-sauce bliss. More and more, following along with their wildest, most spontaneous impulses proves rewarding.
