Forming in the hurly-burly, the bustle and the hustle of the late-2010s London music scene that converged around the Windmill and the Five Bells, the debut album of screwball sextet Blue Bendy has been cooking for a little age. ‘So Medieval’ arrives five years after the group’s debut single ‘Suspension’, but dear reader, let me assure you that this glorious inversion of guitar pop as we know it has been worth the wait.
A truly iconoclastic prospect, Blue Bendy stand apart from their post-punk contemporaries with music too inventive for genre classification. The touchstones here are disparate; Grandaddy’s Y2K paranoia-driven indie rock, the weirdo-country of Peter Grudzien, and the maximalist guitar-pop melodrama of Lucio Battisti; and the results are really quite novel.
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‘So Medieval’, the title track sees Arthur Nolan, the frontman with his verbose, wilting, warbling delivery immediately announce himself on the LP, his cries of “no sex, no mess, no second chance” gloriously entangled by the knotty, gnarled indie rock. Nolan remains a live-wire throughout, his delivery often recalling ghosts of David Sylvian, while he interjects with lyrical cryptids and curios in the half-spaces like “I’m just the boy / you made feel like Kendall Roy”.
At its core, this debut is a puzzle, one so dense that it will take dozens of listens to fully rewire your brain to everything Blue Bendy are scheming. The sound is a hard-to-place writhing thing, the songs are full of tilted twists and turns, and Nolan’s lyrical proclivities veer often towards the dada and the abstract – ultimately, though, ‘So Medieval’ is worth sticking with – some things are worth the effort.
8/10
Words: Cal Cashin
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