Friday April 29

BAD MOVES

GAUCHE

BOTTLED UP

$15 / Doors at 8:00

Chaos Year aside, the most surprising day of 2020 was when a (since deleted) well-written and good-hearted list of the author’s 100 favorite power pop bands resulted in a cavalcade of bile and aggression from…power pop fans. Stunningly, these fans (and musicians) police their genre with the same religious zeal and sneering condemnation as hardcore or metal fans. Theirs is a genre of structure, of proud lineages to 60s and 70s pop heroes, of sticky hooks arranged with dioramic precision. A breath of fresh air was needed in the stuffy discourse. We needed a loose cannon.
Enter Bad Moves: a D.C. band that plays energetic, freewheeling power pop that pulls from punk as well as from vintage power pop. The album frequently rises to the heights of early New Pornographers: “Party With the Kids…” has the groovy simmer of Dan Bejar’s New Pornos contributions, and the breathless 2-and-a-half minutes of “Local Radio” lines up hook after hook until the whole thing topples over into a sing-along that recalls “The Bleeding Heart Show”‘s triumphant coda. Untenable manages to address the oppressiveness of existence under late-stage capitalism on songs like “Working For Free” in a way that still makes you want to shimmy. I shouted along to “That’s not a bug, that’s a feature!” as I shook my butt mournfully through my apartment, afraid of losing my job and my elderly family members and music venues and years of my life, twerking into the dread, throwing ass into the yawning void. – Keegan Bradford, The Alternative