Bad Moves (Record Release Show!) w/ Perennial & 2nd Grade at Foto Club

Name: Bad Moves (Record Release Show!) w/ Perennial & 2nd Grade at Foto Club
Start: 2024-09-28T19:30:00-04:00
End: 2024-09-28T23:00:00-04:00
Location: Foto Club

Schedule

Sat Sep 28 2024 at 07:30 pm to 11:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Foto Club | Philadelphia, PA

BAD MOVES
When people sing together, is it necessarily cathartic? Is catharsis necessarily rejuvenating? And what if the aftermath of catharsis turns out to be the same old frustration? With their third LP, Washington, D.C.’s Bad Moves have expanded their founding artistic identity — a candy-coated guitar-pop shell surrounding a bitter lyrical core — by refracting their ideas through a new set of musical forms that weaponize repetition. On the new Wearing Out the Refrain, recorded once again with producer Joe Reinhart (Hop Along, Algernon Cadwallader), Bad Moves propose that the flip side of the delirious harmony of the basement show singalong is the volatile, accusatory antiphony of a community divided by strain, shouting the same desperate hook back and forth at one another.
There is a pervasive perception that in power pop, hooks often come at the expense of lyrical sophistication, even intelligibility — that long vowels and crisp consonants are merely the empty frame on which to hang those euphoric bridges and serotonin-rush outros. But perhaps not since Chumbawamba has a group so effectively combined pop architecture with focused and detailed narratives (“cleaning literal shit from a dive bar toilet,” the band recounts in “New Year’s Reprieve”) of class rage and communal despair. Their collective songwriting allows for a conceptual unity, in which an album about feeling caught in repetitive cycles expresses that theme not just lyrically — as in the recurring imagery of swirling riptides and drain-circling undertows — but sonically, intentionally beating a riff into the ground to make a point. The structure of the New Pornographers-esque “Let The Rats Inherit the Earth” is Sisyphean fatalism defined, stopping and starting over every time the music is about to reach a peak.
Bad Moves’ tag-team vocals, which forgo centering any one member, also let the traditionally confessional “I” become the “we” of a community, or a generation. Witness the ambitious climate change metaphor of “Eviction Party,” which understands the union of sugary pop and genuine angst embodied by 1960s girl-group songcraft, and uses it to expand a personal story to planetary scale. “It’s my eviction, I’ll cry if I want to,” the group shouts at the climax, channeling the dawning millennial midlife crisis. The personal may be political, but what if both feel weighed down and trapped in circular, inescapable ruts?
To say “D.C. punk” invokes the rigorous austerity of the Dischord Records scene, a world that might seem visually and musically distant from Bad Moves’ exuberance. But in a city necessarily dominated by politics, art and activism have long been intertwined forces, uniting voices in spirit and action as well as sound. The band’s deep roots in D.C.’s DIY venues and organizations are in natural dialogue with the politics of songs like “Hallelujah” and “Undertow,” which project the consequences of institutional attacks on queer identity.
As the supposed opposition of guitar-based rock and empty-calorie pop passes its fifth decade of discourse, Bad Moves — who have been as vocal about their love of K-pop as of Ted Leo — expose the emptiness of that binary. Song form is as flexible and expressive a vehicle for anger as for euphoria, for apathy as for commitment, for the individual as for the cooperative. Maintaining the capacity for musical joy is one more way to stand up for your convictions, especially when the world around you seems stuck on the same soul-numbing note. - Franz Nicolay
PERENNIAL
Perennial is an art punk three-piece from New England. The band’s sound - built from the sharp minimalism of electric organ, guitar & drums - is a kinetic collage of mod pop, 90s post-hardcore, post-bop jazz, 60s soul, and British Invasion garage rock. Their live sets are quick, angular, and ferocious: 20 minute bursts of wild energy. Their new album Art History is available everywhere chic modernist punk is sold.
2ND GRADE
Ringing from hi-fi headphones and blown-out boombox speakers alike comes the overloaded guitar genius of Easy Listening, a record of rock ‘n’ roll daydreams and terminal boredom, and 2nd Grade’s long awaited second LP on Double Double Whammy. Like a blue slushy on a hot day, Easy Listening is a sweet respite. Like the Blue Angels touching down on the Las Vegas Strip, Easy Listening is impossible to ignore. And like a janitor mopping up beer on the floor of the Hollywood Palladium in 1972, hours after the Rolling Stones have finished “Ventilator Blues” and climbed onto the bus, Easy Listening knows the glory and cost of escapism, abandon, and the soul of rock ‘n’ roll. Philadelphia’s 2nd Grade (Peter Gill, Catherine Dwyer, Jon Samuels, David Settle, and Fran Lyons) is a band both obsessed with and worthy of rock stardom, and Easy Listening proves their status as virtuosos of the power pop renaissance.
Sonically and lyrically, Easy Listening pays tribute to a guitar lineage linking the Stones to the Flamin’ Groovies, to Redd Kross and Guided By Voices. With its spiraling hooks and handclapped quarter note beat, lead single “Strung Out On You” sounds like an alternate reality post-Radio City Big Star cut. In 2nd Grade’s world, music history is a prism, not a linear progression. Famous teens transcend time on the outro to “Teenage Overpopulation,” a shouted cacophony of names including Tommy Stinson, Lizzie McGuire, and Joan of Arc. The line between the love of an audience and that of a romantic partner is blurred on songs like “Hands Down” and “Me & My Blue Angels.” Across the album, hi-fi and lo-fi styles splice together; playful references and surreal hints of impossibility build a complex, believable world atop a foundation of simple and sticky melodies that resonate on very first listen.
As usual, 2nd Grade are generous with their album offerings, packing 16 songs on Easy Listening. Most tracks clock in around two minutes, almost indulgent compared to the average runtime on 2nd Grade’s debut 24-track LP Hit to Hit. On Easy Listening however, the band develops their theory of quantum teenage energy, composed of equal parts sincerity and swagger. Basement drums and bass run full speed ahead. Gill’s vocal deliveries range from sweet to snotty. Guitar performances from Samuels and Dwyer similarly alternate between clean power-pop jangle and lo-fi scuzz, dedicated above all to the band’s lodestar: riffs that rule.
Easy Listening doesn’t just reference its larger-than-life forebearers – it builds a multi-layered dreamworld of punk and rock mythology from beginning to end, allowing both band and listener to revel, at least for a moment, in radio star euphoria. “We’re MVPs of MTV/Don’t have to live like a refugee/We’re VIPs of VH1/Learning to fly and free fallin,” Gill sings on Track 1, “Cover of Rolling Stone.” Later, on “Planetarium,” Gill colors his starry daydream with everyday pathos: “My lawyer says not to talk to the press/but I just like the way that they listen.” Across the album, yesteryear’s guitar heroes show up as totemic symbols, transmuting their own worlds of meaning into new expressions in Gill’s overactive imagination.
For all its abundance, Gill’s imagination is also desperate. The brilliance of Easy Listening lies in its longing, and in the blindingly clear difference between the myth of rockstar ecstasy and the reality of ennui, stagnation, and addiction. Like anybody, the voice of 2nd Grade just wants somebody to listen and there’s nothing more human than fantasizing about the things we don’t have. Like 2nd Grade, we’re all children, “dreaming of dreaming of dreaming a dream.”