"you talk a bad game, our love is just the same, green eyes- green eyes - green eyes..."
From the onset, "Punish" by Oakland / Los Angeles tethered Bottled Up feels like a surreal multi-roomed maze with each door containing different sonic things, from late 70's Roxy Music dance proto punk, to 80's avant French pop and New York Tom Tom Club funk punk to 90's modest mice scurrying between the feet of Duran Duran while they share drinks with Talking Heads and Human Sexual Response. Dig the midnight movie-esque spastic saxophones, the disco side stepping bass lines, the rapturous blond sparkling embellishments and frontman Nikhil Rao's pawing vocal aesthetic. Finding out that Rao's inspirations include Television, Alan Vega, Italo disco and Suburban Lawns (hell, yes, my fledgling band in another world opened up for them) makes perfect sense.
"Punish" is the name of a 3 song single which is a precursor to this year's full length "Grand Bizarre" (dropping May 27th) which portends to be (in my words) a fucking trip just like the Official Video for "Punish" as directed and produced by Drew Hagelin.
-Robb Donker Curtius
https://www.facebook.com/bottledupdc
https://bottledup.bandcamp.com/album/grand-bizarre
https://open.spotify.com/track/41mP6s50JpuilPe1WL4VZM
https://soundcloud.com/bottledup
Bottled Up’s Grand Bizarre takes the idea of punk and makes it global, digital, and online in 2022. From finding meaning in a world riddled with climate change, playing love’s supernatural mind games, or, as frontman Niko Rao puts it, the daily act of "subconsciously submitting and surrendering to death" -- Bottled Up’s back-and-forth with the "Big Stuff" makes for an utterly danceable album of as-the-world-burns Italo, funk, and new wave.
The album brings soft, curvilinear dub to the edges and corners of David Byrne’s art-pop. The synth-forward mixing (by DC-based D Saperstein and Rao himself) is as indebted to the PC Music collective and Charli XCX’s hyperpop as it is to the sophisti-pop of Destroyer. This is rock, reworked. House flair, glam intonations, disco four-on-the-floors - each genre gets a good whir in the Bottled Up machine to make a hot, entropic mass.
https://bottledup.bandcamp.com/album/grand-bizarre
https://open.spotify.com/track/41mP6s50JpuilPe1WL4VZM
https://soundcloud.com/bottledup
Bottled Up’s Grand Bizarre takes the idea of punk and makes it global, digital, and online in 2022. From finding meaning in a world riddled with climate change, playing love’s supernatural mind games, or, as frontman Niko Rao puts it, the daily act of "subconsciously submitting and surrendering to death" -- Bottled Up’s back-and-forth with the "Big Stuff" makes for an utterly danceable album of as-the-world-burns Italo, funk, and new wave.
The album brings soft, curvilinear dub to the edges and corners of David Byrne’s art-pop. The synth-forward mixing (by DC-based D Saperstein and Rao himself) is as indebted to the PC Music collective and Charli XCX’s hyperpop as it is to the sophisti-pop of Destroyer. This is rock, reworked. House flair, glam intonations, disco four-on-the-floors - each genre gets a good whir in the Bottled Up machine to make a hot, entropic mass.
+ + +
We get by with a little help from our friends
Bottled Up, alt pop, art punk, funky, avant pop, avant rock, dance punk, "Punish", Oakland, Los Angeles, songwriter, producer Nikhil Rao, alt rock, dream theater, "Grand Bizarre" album,
No comments:
Post a Comment