BOBBY is a brand-spanking-new dream-folk outfit, getting their feet wet on their first ever tour opening for the well-loved folk-folk outfit The Low Anthem. They’re so new that their album isn’t out, hasn’t leaked, and doesn’t have a release date (some time this summer on Partisan Records). There are two songs on soundcloud, and that seems to be it.
Now, I’m usually late to the party when it comes to new bands (if I make it at all), so the unwonted delight of BOBBY’s set was doubled by the evanescent thrill of being (relatively speaking) the ONLY ONE privy to the secret. I’m letting you in on it. Please don’t tell anyone.
BOBBY play to their boy-next-door moniker – their songs typically offer a noodled, tossed-off guitar figure, of the sort that lives and dies a gnat’s curtailed lifecycle wherever someone picks up a guitar without a clear idea of what comes next. But then something wonderful happens – a bass, a shaker, some keys, a kickdrum, begin their own indirect, slightly autistic conversations, tugging at the meter. The result is reminiscent of Beach House’s gauzy, half-awake glimmering, but multiplied, like a pre-dawn jam session between friends who’ve spent the night falling into each other’s dreamscapes. The effect is aided by the snoozy, contemplative way the band members sit around when not actually playing, chins in hands, almost curled up.
In the cavernously clear acoustics of Boston’s Old South Church, the result was both incongruous and cozy – the stained glass glowed like a fading dream, and the audience snuggled down in their pews and into each other’s shoulders, waiting for the moments when the band started awake in a sudden rush of adrenaline before gently subsiding into the articulate burbling of semi-consciousness.
Check out "Sore Spores" below.
