Hometown Sounds

Indie pop supergroup Bad Moves has earned the distinguished moniker. Their upcoming debut full length album Tell No One on Don Giovanni Records is the most anticipated release in months, and last week the album’s fourth, that’s right FOURTH, music video premiered on Stereogum. “Crushed Out” is a delightfully catchy song about those queer high school crushes that overwhelm at the time but seem so obvious in retrospect. Clyde Peterson and Max Otero get the band into adolescent cosplay for the video, and Katie Park’s forlorn singing will grab your heart and not let go. Insanely, the album release show Friday September 21st at Black Cat isn’t sold out yet, so consider yourself warned.

We waited so very patiently for new jams from indie pop supergroup Bad Moves, and just last month we got it with the catchy “Cool Generator”. Now Don Giovanni Records and Baby Pony Food Productions reward us again with the new single “One Thing”. The song deals with keeping secrets, so the David Combs and Ben Epstein directed video references top secret keepers from the band’s youth. We get a strong Carmen Sandiego vibe from dancer and bassist Emma Cleveland’s performance around the Chinatown neighborhood. Bad Moves sold out their tour kickoff show last week at Union Stage, so maybe you should grab tix now for their next hometown show with Bat Fangs opening for Hop Along at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday June 5th.

If the world worked the way it should, Bad Moves would be crushing FM radio with their approachable pop-punk songs. The supergroup featuring the Max Levine Ensemble’s David “Spoonboy” Combs, Katie Park of Hemlines, Daoud Tyler-Ameen of Art Sorority for Girls and Emma Cleveland of Bad Moves are back with “Cool Generator”, the lead single from their upcoming full length album on Don Giovanni Records. The band has a lot to say about the lyrical content of this song:

We’ve often introduced this song as being about how the art and fashion produced by marginalized people, people of color and queer people specifically, are the source material most often appropriated by the mainstream entertainment industry. And yet, those communities themselves are the most likely to be at risk — of poverty, police violence, mental illness, et cetera.

The New York Times Popcast did a great interview recently on the subject of rap stars being targeted by the criminal justice system, which gets at some of the same ideas that originally inspired us. Kenneth J. Montgomery, a criminal laywer, talks about the entertainment narrative of the “young black dangerous guy,” and he says, “Everybody benefits off of that, except the people that generate it.” Basically, there are cultural producers who are happy to profit off of a criminalized version of black identity for its entertainment value, while doing nothing to protect those cultural generators from a system that disproportionately targets them.

As far as synthesizing that complicated social dynamic into the lyrics of a power-pop party jam, we did our best. It’s a song about how certain people take the markers of culture and benefit from them without being put at risk, and how, when we consume a commoditized version of culture uncritically, we ignore the social precarity of the people who generate it in the first place.

Watch the VHS-grade music video courtesy of the multi-talented Combs and make plans to catch their post-SXSW tour kickoff show at Union Stage on April 18th.

In the future, maybe not too far off, experts say that wars won’t be fought over oil, politics or religion, but instead over the most basic resource to humanity, water. In that regard, the wait staff at Shaw’s southern diner Torrie’s is remarkably generous with their dispensation of nature’s healthiest beverage, and we say bravOH. What’s worse than going thirsty during a delicious salty meal? Power-pop supergroup Bad Moves provides the soundtrack here with “The Verge”, the melody-powered anthem of good times right around the corner and the standout song from 2016’s self-titled debut EP on Don Giovanni Records. Catch David Combs, Daoud Tyler-Ameen, Katie Park and Emma Cleveland on tour now, stopping in DC late Sunday night at Comet Ping-Pong.