The song that spent the last 12 months thriving as the epic denouement to their much-travelled live show, Blue Bendy’s latest single ‘Cloudy’ offers the band’s first true masterpiece.
Unleashing a 6+ minute odyssey that set legs weightless and trembling under its sheer gobstopping brilliance, ‘Cloudy’ offers the ultimate collision of all the precious elements that make Blue Bendy so wonderful to love. Song structures jerk in, out, around, and sometimes through whatever semblance of tantalising groove that’s wafted across our gormless faces. Monolithic pillars of gorgeous noise pile up and soar high, even as the sextet simultaneously toy with the music’s very foundations.
To cut the story short, ‘Cloudy’ burns at that pivotal moment where passion spills over and the awful truth of it all becomes oh so beautiful and real. It’s all in there, in the cymbal smashes, guitar string crashes; in those keyboards twinkling with the righteous blessings of angels. All of it. There. In those askew lyrical pirouettes from erratic frontman Arthur Nolan that flit line-by-line from the absurd to the arrow-to-the-heart beautiful, (some of his finest) – “I’ve got beef with a monkey account”; “I hear you’re gonna quit for band / but you can’t hold it together without it holding your hand.” There it is, folded inside our open palms, that whole stupid messy emotion-splattered clusterfuck that comes with simply trying to keep happy and stay alive – a clusterfuck that includes, admittedly other things, clucking hens and buying big houses.
After all the years of graft and bubbling buzz, Blue Bendy are transcending before our eyes, realising their most perfect and beguiling forms, entering a giddying new evolution. We’re told that ‘Cloudy’ is the first tune from a batch of 10, one that has “nine equally loved siblings”. What does it all mean?
Photo by James Ogram
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