Bad Moves discuss the ‘existential nausea’, dark humour, and collective songcraft behind their new power-pop album, ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’.
Words: Rob Mair.
“It’s exhausting to live in an oppressive world, and it’s exhausting because it doesn’t stop. It fucks with your sense of time. Repetition does that too,” says Bad Moves’ David Combs, as we discuss the DC power-pop group’s latest missive to a crumbling society, ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’.
“The phrase I had come up with to talk about is ‘existential nausea’,” David continues. “Like, trying to articulate the feeling of having the spins, of feeling anxious, but at the same time make it part of the record, and just riding that line a little.”
‘Existential nausea’ feels like the perfect descriptor for the group’s socially aware, anxiety-ridden but also whip-smart, at times achingly funny, pop. Another phrase might be ‘uncomfortable truths’, as the group go to some pretty dark places and speak truth to power through rhyme and allegory. Their approach is certainly at odds with the notion that pop is something that is easy to consume and lacking in artistic merit.
Indeed, in the case of Bad Moves (completed by drummer/vocalist Daoud Tyler-Ameen, guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Katie Park, and bass player/vocalist Emma Cleveland), pop is merely a vehicle for delivery, and by marrying lyrical smarts with knowing musicality, they’ve delivered the album of their career, which pulls on this notion of repetition and is reflected in the album’s title, ‘Wearing out the Refrain’.
It’s an album about being trapped in cycles and struggling to find a way out – but it’s also about hope and community and responsibility.
“We purposely tried to make repetition both a kind of lyrical concept – like feeling trapped in cycles or feeling stuck in purgatorial spaces – but then have that bleed into the form of the songs, whether that’s about lyrics repeating or a riff that won’t go away for the entire fucking song,” says David.
“That all helps to give a sense of the heaviness about those uncomfortable truths, as you put it. And part of that heaviness is that you don’t know how to get away from it. You can hear that repetition on the opening song [‘A Drowning Confession’] and ‘Let the Rats Inherit the Earth’. They’re like a motor that’s propelling you, and each time it starts to break out of that cycle, we make it stop and then start all over again like you’ve skipped back to the start of the track.”
Then there’s the lyrical reflections. One song is called ‘The Undertow’, while ‘A Drowning Confession’ includes a refrain around ‘the undertow’ as it drags you down and the futility of fighting against it. Elsewhere, imagery of the Catholic church and Catholicism run riot, as do criticisms of authority and authoritarian regimes and consumer culture. It’s ultimately a record crafted – sculpted even – to the point where every note or lyric feels deliberate and nuanced.
This can be seen in the group’s astonishingly detailed approach to songwriting, which would make more individualistic artists run for the hills. A collective in the truest sense of the word – they share out vocal duties, meaning they don’t have a nominated lead singer – while songwriting is tackled from the perspective of the group, with everyone free to edit and feed in suggestions.
“Part of the process for Bad Moves is that anybody can bring anything to the table, and they can edit and collaborate with anything that anybody else brings to the table,” says David. “Most of the time, on this record, it started with music or a lyrical concept that I’ve brought in, but then we’ll have a conversation about which direction the lyrics should go in. Then you take a draft and somebody else will point out what’s strong or where they’d like to move away from something.
“Or, if we know we want to write a song about something… like there have been songs we’ve written where Katie and I have been sitting down having a long conversation where I take notes, then I’ll use those notes, like putting a puzzle together, to write the lyrics.
“Musically, everyone contributes to the arrangements and the songs, and the vocal arrangements – like it’s a fully collaborative thing. ‘Would this sound good if you sang this? Do you think it would sound good if I sing this? What about if we try swapping this part?’”
“And often that’s not just having to do with vocal range,” says Daoud. “Emma is our best shouter and can take lines that I could never imagine being convincing with. So, some of it’s about what suits a person in a technical sense, and some of it is about matching an idea to a personality.
“We’ve had a lot of practices in the lead up to making the records that have involved everybody putting their instruments down and sitting cross-legged on the floor and trying a hundred versions of a vocal arrangement. We’ll be like ‘OK, that didn’t quite work, let’s try this note instead of this note.’ Or ‘doubling it doesn’t quite work, what about using this harmony’ and trying it over and over until you get it right. It’s a pain in the ass, but it does work.”
Indeed, it’s an odd frame of reference for a DIY band from DC, but the results on ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’ are as close to the New Pornographers’ outstandingly brilliant ‘Twin Cinema’ opus as anything else. If you think of a Venn diagram, it’s probably squarely in the centre between the Canadian supergroup and the UK’s finest socially aware firebrands, Martha – and that’s not a bad spot to be in.
That Martha and Bad Moves have a shared history should come as little surprise; David has previously toured with pre-Martha band Onsind, and both bands have toured together across the states in support of Jeff Rosenstock. A further tour was also scheduled prior to the pandemic to support Bad Moves’ excellent second album, ‘Untenable’.
“I think, when I started Bad Moves, Martha was probably the most explicit influence, both because of what they do musically, but also how they function,” says David. “They collaborate and have all of their individual personalities present in the music, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a single front person – and they don’t have anything lacking because of that.”
Nevertheless, the New Pornographers theme can be seen starkly on the brilliant ‘A Lapse in the Emptiness’, ‘Let the Rats Inherit the Earth’ and ‘Days Don’t Quit’. Daoud and David admit to discussing them a little, but acknowledge the similarities with what they were aiming for.
“Certainly thinking about ‘Twin Cinema’, one of the aspects of some of the great songs on that record, like ‘The Bleeding Heart Show’ or ‘Sing Me Spanish Techno’ is this element of hammering repetition,” says Daoud. “Like it’s not just repeating a song form over and over again, it’s like taking a particular line and repeating it over and over again. And the effect of that is that you start to experience it just as a sound – like the words come apart a little bit – but then, when they come back together, the sense of what’s being said looks a little different, and you realise that there’s a couple of ways to look at the text.
“I think a lot of the repetition on ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’ is about where the connection to the meaning of what’s being spoken is becoming more and more tenuous, and it’s up to you to reassert your own sense of reality.”
If all this sounds daunting, fear not. You’ll be hard-pushed to find a more accessible or infectious album this year. Bad Moves are the masters of the three-minute pop song, and ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’ is choc-full of hits. It’s an album that can be enjoyed as a piece of art or as a think piece on society’s ills – and both are entirely correct and valid. At the core is a sense of optimism – a kernel of hope – even if things seem a little downbeat thematically – and it’s this which pulls you safely through the undertow.
Bad Moves’ album ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’ is out now.
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