BOBBY is an indie outfit from Massachusetts made up of a bunch of high school friends. Locked in a house for a couple of months, BOBBY's self titled debut sounds cared for, every note nurtured to as only a friend could. BOBBY explores a soft, stretched-out side of indie-pop; at over an hour long,
BOBBY drifts along at an initally exhausted pace, seemingly only interested in draining every ounce of life from the listener, unless of course you let the wonderous layers of melody pass over you.
BOBBY is an immersive album, enveloping as much space as it can; guitars ring for what seems like forever, drums lazily make a jagged beat, synths soar and implode, but none of it seems contrived. The whole thing is kept tightly together because ringing out through all this sound are threads of friendship, like everyone in the band had their turn to say how they felt about everyone else, and the music was the words. This is immediately noticeable in the album's opening track "We Saw"; the song is somber and meloncholic, but has this inner sense of prevailing to it, possibly accentuated by a thumping drum beat that gives the song's acoustic plucking a track to follow. Much of the album's songs are comprised of over 5 minute long, quiet jams that are at once uncompromising and remedial, usually without percussion to drive the tracks.
Instead
BOBBY takes a flowing, impulsive road, never really going anywhere but never stopping to look back. The one exception (and possibly the album's best track) is "Sore Spores", a tightly more structured affair with glorious highs, but it's all focused drifting after that. "Nam Champ" is a slow burning, stoned day dream, reminiscent of
You Forgot It In People era Broken Social Scene, if Rachel Goswell was the vocalist. "Ginger (Water Birth)" is similar in its lack of a wave, a steadily quirky track with synths and vocal "ooo's" aplenty before crumbling into feedback. In fact, the majority of
BOBBY is akin to riding a wave that never breaks, an anti-climactic journey that's never really faint, but all the more memorable for its lack of blockbuster moments. BOBBY take pieces from shoegaze, dream pop, indie rock and cultivate them into something that's not really wholly like any of the aforementioned genres, and the denouement is original, though not completely inventive.
