Bad Trouble

Album review

Working remotely, Canadian duo Body Breaks forged an idiosyncratic sound with the unlikely combination of microtonal guitar leads and straightforward indie rock song structures. For debut album Bad Trouble, barebones instrumentals of guitar, bass, and drums were put together in Montreal by multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx and Toronto-based vocalist Julie Reich, who completed the songs by adding lyrical and vocal parts to LeGroulx's prismatic tracks. The unconventional guitar tunings often land in a range beyond the 12 notes used in standard Western tuning, and give Body Breaks' otherwise familiar-feeling slacker rock a dramatically warped feel. Opening track "Between the Heart and the Mind" begins with a dizzying two-guitar line with this distinctively water-damaged character. Before the drums and vocals kick in, the tune sounds like a Pavement demo playing on a malfunctioning turntable. All of Bad Trouble's eight brief songs are similar. Throughout the album, LeGroulx's hooky and succinct compositions recall the obtuse rock of Sleater-Kinney, Clinic, or Electrelane, only with dissonant guitar leads twisting the sounds into new shapes. Reich's vocal arrangements also differ from song to song and take the compositions to unexpected places. She delivers controlled lower register harmonies over the anxious distortion of "Work for the Man," and sung-spoken lines on the rocking "Generation Y" before switching seamlessly to layered dreaminess on album standout "Eyes to Brightness." Bad Trouble is here and gone at just around 22 minutes, offering a new kind of head-spinning pop that's disorienting in the best possible way. The band throws one more curveball with closing track "Break the Icons Down," abruptly switching gears from the spectrum of fuzzy tones and punky blasts of the rest of the album to a relatively gentle acoustic tune sung by LeGroulx. The song is over in less than two minutes, leaving listeners the enjoyable task of starting the album over to try to get their heads around Body Breaks' exhilaratingly angular creative vision.
© Fred Thomas /TiVo