Bassvictim’s Forever Is Playful, Exuberant, and Never Boring
by Ben Rosielle, Contributor
Illustration by Adi Borodiniceanu
Won’t someone pity the pop musician? Barraged on all sides by fans, managers, labels, and critics, all yelping and whining at once. Your every artistic move scrutinized, picked apart, ogled at on social media and subsequently commodified and transformed into revenue for the parasitic, ungrateful music industry. No one really understands you. Take a vacation. Visit Norway. Go to the Betty Fjord Clinic recording studio. Record your debut album in two weeks. Sure. Go on. Make the album art the pattern of an ugly knit sweater. Do it. You know you want to.
The UK duo Bassvictim have always stood out from their so-called “indie sleaze” contemporaries; they don’t have the glassy-eyed sleekness of Snow Strippers and Suzy Sheer, or the shy, understated dorkiness of 2hollis and The Hellp. Mingled in with all the ketamine and post-ironic coolness is a sense of childlike kookiness that has propelled Bassvictim’s music since day one.
Their first (and best) song, “Air on a G String”, is a carefree celebration of sexual liberty, buoyed by vocalist Maria Manow’s endearing Polish accent and producer Ike Clateman’s ever-shifting, turbocharged dance beat. The song is happy to make very little sense. Is she really wearing that g-string? It does not matter. “Air on a G String” is horny, silly, and has had me hooked since my first listen. The sense of unadulterated whimsy that defines “Air on a G String” can be seen in the best of Bassvictim’s output, and has reached its zenith (so far) with Forever, the duo’s debut album.
“It’s me Maria”, opens up the record by smashing a few overlapping synth leads into a synthetic breakbeat pattern, combined with cascading layers of Manow repeatedly yelling her first name alongside various Polish and English expletives. The ceaseless, aggressive, repetition of her name (pronounced as Mar-ya rather than Mah-ree-uh), could be seen as Manow asserting her identity and personhood in an act of defiance against both her haters and those who misunderstand her. It could also mean nothing at all. The fact that both of these are likely possibilities is quintessential Bassvictim.
Following up “It’s me Maria” is “27a Pitfield St”, which—thanks to the duo’s magic touch—manages to feel gentle and sentimental in spite of its borderline vapid and somewhat loose plot about trying to pick up drugs and throw a house party. Even with the line “Open up your phone, order more, vibes amazing,” the song is imbued with a warm, melancholy feeling. It’s an anthem for letting things go, missing your friends, staying up all night partying and then walking home without your phone, nicely summed up by the line “goes without saying all this noise feels like youth time.”
My favorite moment on the album comes during the hazy “Lil Maria”, as the song builds up a weightless, majestic pre-drop before faking out the listener with a sudden dip in momentum that instantly swerves into a rumbling, feverish groove. It’s anti-climactic in the best way possible, channeling the tension of the buildup into a moment subversive, explosive and sublime.
Forever owes as much to the indie pop of the 2000s as it does to trashy dance music. It’s the flip side of the ethos of “indie sleaze,” which transports an anachronistic view of late 2000s alternative dance music onto contemporary, often unrelated acts tied together by a loose aesthetic. While there are plenty of great artists categorized as indie “sleaze,” the label itself is regressive; it boxes new music into the confines of the old. Forever escapes these confines by shedding much of the straightforward dance aesthetic of Bassvictim’s earlier work in favor of a colorful, naturalistic sound more akin to Animal Collective or The Go! Team. These two contrasting aesthetics (dance and indie) are combined and transformed into a sound full of references but unmistakably new. Forever thrives on these kinds of contradictions and tensions, constantly oscillating between profundity and vapidity, sense and nonsense, originality and predictability.
Above all, the most impressive thing about Forever is how piecemeal and unpolished it sounds. After the slightly disappointing Basspunk 2, Bassvictim were at a crossroads. With such a painfully hip reputation, and in the face of so much pressure, they could’ve easily gone bigger, opting for a smoother, more Snow Strippers-y sound. They have the songwriting and production chops to make such a stylistic leap, but chose to go in the opposite direction and double down on the wackiness that made their music feel so beautiful and alive in the first place.
Even when Bassvictim borrow sound palettes or textures from 2010's empty-mall-core electropop, the results always come out a little warped and fried, and delightfully so. To release something deliberately undercooked isn’t an easy decision to make as an artist, but it’s probably the right one for the sake of their longevity and integrity as a group, and the music doesn’t suffer for it. Plus, now we know how to really pronounce Maria’s name.
