“Gold and Warm”
from the album Bad Veins
2009 (re-release)
iTunes
By its very nature, a two-man lineup is limiting. That’s sort of the whole idea. You work within a very, very limited framework. You meet your limitations head on, embrace them and make them your strengths. You make simplicity a weapon.
Bad Veins doesn’t work that way. Singer/guitarist Benjamin Davis isn’t too into limitations. He’s not even too tied up in the idea of the whole live-music experience, either, if you want to be frank about it. Removing both of those hurdles paved the way for the entry a gigantic, outmoded reel-to-reel tape deck lovingly dubbed Irene into the band’s inner workings. With Irene came possibilities, infinite ones stretched out like the future before an eager and naive graduate gripping his diploma. The limitations of a two-man band were out the window. The limits of a 17-man band were also out the window.
Although Irene was actually Bad Veins’ second member before drummer Sebastian Schultz came on the scene, that’s essentially the story behind Bad Veins, whether live or in the studio. Davis, more of a composer than a rocker, puts down all sorts of sounds onto tape and the pair learn to play along with them. It’s only cheating if you’re still up in arms about bands playing to prerecorded drum machine tracks. The rest of us should be over it.
That frees up Bad Veins to move in all sorts of directions. It still stays tethered to a single aesthetic, that of a record-collecting pop nerd’s steamiest fantasy. “Found” leads listeners into the album as clarinet and brass swirl together with drums, guitar and Davis’ vocals, forcing orchestrated sophistication on the basement-pop sound. A little further in the record, “Falling Tide” pushes guitars, which are densely layered with overlapping fuzz tones, into the stratosphere, smacking of a lo-fi mindset, worship of bands like Hum and an indie-pop fiend’s love of a watertight melody. Between those two ends, Bad Veins explores a little of everything. There’s a little bit of too-precious use of harpsichord or the like (“This Ending”), a synth-based dose of noisy art-punk and fuzzy guitars (“Gold and Warm”), a soulful, dimly lit ballad (“Afraid”) and a highly sculpted batch of electro-pop (“Go Home”).
Don’t let the drums and guitar confuse the matter. Bad Veins is a studio outfit here to make songs like producers make songs. Bad Veins is as versatile as a two-man band is supposed to be limited.