BOBBY • Sore Spores
Reader, though we gave you fair warning with our last post that we’d be taking a little time away from the blog to attend to things like demanding work schedules and even more demanding party planning schedules (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KATIE!!!), we nonetheless have been plagued by persistent pangs of guilt for shunning our committed, silent, potentially fictional audience.
So we give you a better-late-than-never Music Monday post featuring a band we saw open up for the phenomenal Thao + Mirah last week—the enigmatic, hippy-trippy, search-engine-defeating BOBBY. Yes, their name is unfortunate, we must admit, but they seem to have fully embraced it, talking about the band as an ethereal entity in and of itself—
“When Tom (primary songwriter) finally did meet him face to face in the Spring of 2010, Bobby became nervous and got sick all over his little brown tap shoes and turned into a mist. He was naught but vapor for a whole month, but soon after that, they fell in together; Tom making tunes to accompany Bobby’s sad dances.”
I know. Trippy stuff. But you’ve got to hand it to them—they have fully embraced this odd, hallucinogenic-like persona for the band, which is pretty evident in their live show, which features Woodstock-era wavy arm dancing and some pretty kaleidoscopic bizarro visuals. Taking any of this alone, it’s easy to immediately dislike the band. Especially when they name their songs things like “Ginger (Water Birth),” “Shimmychick,” and “Tomb Bloom.” But taken as a whole, and especially in long form—either at one of their live shows or in listening to their album start-to-finish—they start to win you over with their seemingly sincere blend of chaotic tranquility, accented by catchy, unique instrumentation and a good balance of rhythm-centric and melody-centric singing.
This week’s Song of the Week—“Sore Spores”—(worst title yet), gives evidence to this with an eerily catchy keyboard/theremin line and nice call-and-response from Tom and singer, Molly Sarle. Check ’em out. Their live show really is nice—like very chilled out stumble through a psychedelic forest—and we highly suggest catching them with Thao + Mirah if you can. Excellent show overall. You can find tour dates here (looks like they’re hitting up NYC again in July). And you can pre-order their album, out next week. But give it a listen first—NPR’s got the whole thing up as one of their First Listen features.
