Restiform Bodies: "Bobby Trendy Addendum"

Seven years (yup, it’s really been that long) since first coming to sub-culture prominence for their prodigious, homemade hip-hop delusions, San Francisco’s Restiform Bodies are finally reuniting and releasing their Anticon debut. And, yeah, I’m sure they had their reasons for taking their sweet fucking time, but c’mon: what a huge tease for fans of the Bodies and their rich psychedelic oeuvre. However sonically delinquent and unapologetically lo-fi they might have seemed, they were so widely loved because they actually were really good. Ahead of their time, even. Passage’s lyrics were confessional abstractions uttered with the innocence of a child; Bomarr’s beats were upbeat and sometimes discothèque; and Telephone Jim Jesus introduced absurdist samples and sound elements that were the antithesis of hype. Spun together, it was an anarchist’s carnival of musical disregard, the proverbial thumbing of the nose to big time America.

“Bobby Trendy Addendum” is the blazing, synth-heavy first single from that long-awaited LP, TV Loves You Back. Unlike their earlier material, this is a hi-fi affair that forefronts their signature layers of lazer-warped, bass-heavy synths; tinny drums and bass loops are left in the background as rhythmic supports instead of carrying the entire track through to some illogical conclusion. Yet, despite the formalist influences of each member’s solo work, this is generally still the same party that we left a while back. Passage returns as the the master of ceremonies, standing at the ready on the soapbox with the mic, ready to reign down cultural indictment upon everyone, including himself. Here, he becomes Bobby Trendy, the all too real embodiment of contemporary consumer gluttony. He’s glibly confident about emulating icons (“I’m gonna get it like Joan and Melissa got it, don’t sweat it”) and smugly brags about pathological middle class privilege (“Just enough language to become instantly famous and a pony every birthday regardless of our behavior”). In the last verse, our narrator reminds us, “the finest thing in life is always yours, not what I got”; the horizon turns darker still, leaving Passage gasping with horror in the corner.

So, yeah, phew. For rabid fans of independent music, waiting for your favorite artists to deliver new material after significant time away from the spotlight can amount to emotional torture, especially if things don’t return in recognizable form. Even at the ground level of Independent music, people like you and me still idealize and enfranchise the music that we love into our hearts and our psyches. If this track is any indication of what the album will be like, Restiform Bodies devotees can expect to find the sublime electricity of the crew mostly intact, ready to do battle with bougie credit card surfers and wack remote control wielders alike.

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