Info: Originally the solo project of multi-instrumentalist, David Anthony McGeown, BODIES now plays live as a striking and energetic four-piece, bringing McGeown's emotive lyrics and arrangements to life on stage.
Debut album 'Drench' is an honest, coming-of-age album that McGeown wrote when he was 23, after the untimely death of one of his closest friends and former bandmate. David says: "About a year after he died, I was still going through a very depressive period. I wrote a song about the situation, about him. There was no intention to turn it into a release, or anything like that, it was just a song about how I felt. After I wrote it I felt so much better, so I started writing more songs like that. That’s how 'Drench' happened."
Indeed, friendship is a theme that courses through this album that features many of McGeown's friends and contemporaries such as Ian McFarlane (Kid Karate / Squarehead), Stevie Darragh (Overhead, The Albatross) and Louise Cunnane (Blooms).
Opening with the rhythmic and tribal brush on snare, BODIES' debut LP Drench sets the scene for a dark and spiritual voyage into the song-writing of David Anthony McGeown. The mournful vocal on 'Nightmoves' and general aesthetic of the music evoke the middle period of Radiohead's discography, trickling guitar progressions and mounting distortion working as the advanced building blocks of your final destination.
'I'm Waiting' finds the song-writer sharing a vulnerability which is entirely honest and forthcoming, a central tenet to this album; "A minor key, to put me at ease / When I'm neglecting, Lord, what's right for me / a sea of green, a fear to displease / I've burnt my teeth, no, it's just not me". The long-term impact of continuously placing the imagined needs of others ahead of your own and the inevitable detriment it can lead to summed up in the opening lines.
BODIES - 'I'm Waiting'
There's an unusual and simultaneous sense of joviality, despondency and angst on single 'Limbs'. The bouncing bass-line parallels a hopping percussion at the outset in a mechanically cartoonish kind of way. McGeown's forlorn and nasal vocal tempered immediately by a pursuant cheery backing vocal. The sinister hum finally landing on all fours at 2:35, culminating in a lavish industrial rock finale, that bass and beat from the beginning both reaching a peak before exhaustion, beaten to the finish line by a searing hard rock guitar riff. 'Limbs' is an admirable execution of deliberately stacking sound upon sound until you've squeezed all of the blood from the stone before collapsing in a heap on the dark cold floor.
There's a gentleness to 'Long Way Home' which almost immediately hints at a later harshness to come via the crisp guitar riff. A close listen to the lyrics make it difficult not to feel a sense of sadness, but as with much of the themes of McGeown's songs, a selfless companionship shines through also, an immovable guarantee of a helping hand and ear. The final third rips into the heart of despair with a great violence, defiantly unaccepting of the dark colossus of hopelessness.
A stellar highlight comes in the shape of 'Everything Is Not Lost', with McGeown accompanied by Louise Cunnane of Blooms in a beautifully intertwined vocal pairing. This is 100% the type of sound and mood that gripped me when I first started to get into dreamy instrumental indie-rock as a teenager, I think of God Is An Astronaut, but stripped bare and with added vocals, it's sublime and surprisingly a source of great comfort.
'Waste My Time' is an interesting and unexpected interlude on Drench, I'm immediately reminded of America's 'A Horse With No Name', little touches such as the vroom of the jovial bass line, almost honky-tonk blues-rock percussion and alternating vocal style all make for a pretty cool and vibing moment on the album.
Another fine example (alongside 'Limbs') of the almost surgical ability to layer a slow-building burst of high-energy and chaos arrives on 'Corpus', a disarming rhythmic percussion and soft-toned vocal lull you into a state of quiet contemplation. The enchanting backing vocals at 4:03 create a ritualistic mood, it's the final moment before the beast emerges from the woods, suddenly our safety and comfort is under threat, but just as quickly as fear overcomes us, it dissipates.
'Slave' sees BODIES flip the slow build on its head and get straight down to business in an instantly gripping fashion. High tempo and tightly wound percussion charging through the track like a wild horse that won't be taken down. For all of the customary mood-based sounds, BODIES can slip into bombastic distortion and rock blow-outs at the drop of a hat as required.
There's no other way to view 'September October' as anything other than beautiful, it's impressively visual in the imagery it conjures up, which will of course be different for every listener. For me it's a field of wheat in black and white with a soft autumn breeze wisping its way through the congregated mass, pushing and pulling slowly like a symphony. A no frills finale comes courtesy of 'I'm Done', and its placement is not coincidental I would imagine. It's clear that the writing of Drench was cathartic for McGeown, each track dealing with a different aspect of painful loss. 'I'm Done' is the Pinkerton-esque release, having faced these feelings with great honesty and openness, the track marks a closure, it's also self-critical, two experiences that can only sculpt us into better people in the long run.
Often when I think of Irish albums, I try to view them in the context of how they will be viewed in the future, in retrospect, which records will be seen as an integral part of the fabric of the current era of Irish independent music through the prism of history. Drench is one of those albums, no analysis of this period will be complete without, it is highly unique, the song-writing style just does not exist anywhere else here or abroad to the best of my knowledge. It deals with real, but difficult themes, thus making it highly relatable, McGeown's pain is his own, but it also allows us to reflect on our tragedies too. Giving a voice to our own subconscious thoughts through music is one of the highest achievements you can attain as an artist, and this is exactly what BODIES have afforded us with Drench.
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