For all its railing against conventions, its apparent embrace of the misfits and the ignored, indie music is often strangely apolitical. We might say the right things but there is so much work to do on race, on gender, on class. There is space for so much more engagement with these issues, the possibility for so much greater community and organisation. Bedroom pop could be seen as especially guilty, so caught up in its own lonely woes and memories of the past. But all it takes is someone to join the dots. To take the time to understand what sadness means and where it comes from. Which is to say, the political bedroom pop artist need not discard the genre, just engage with it more deeply, perhaps even over years, to unearth the radical power within.
We’ve followed the career of Dylan Citron since 2014, following the Boston-based songwriter as they explored and developed their sound. Settling on the moniker bedbug, Citron released debut buzzing like a bug in the snow in 2016, an album which laid the foundations for the blend of pop, emo, lo-fi and experimental music that would come to mark their output. Later that year saw the release of if i got smaller grew wings and flew away for good on Z Tapes, a record which ushered in a new era in Citron’s creativity. The album was “very much of our times,” we wrote, “a chronicle of lonely young people comprising of honest, intimate thoughts, wistful, nostalgic instrumentation and the ever-pervasive interjections of pop culture.” Field recordings and samples interspersed the gentle, emo-inflected sincerity of the songs like “ghosts floating through the matrix of our digital world,” and various electronics and effects only added to this effect.
The style continued across 2018’s i’ll count to heaven in years without seasons, released by Run For Cover imprint Joy Void, with Citron not only developing the aesthetic but also the scope and possibilities of its use. The nostalgia and innocence of the genre was present, but a certain weight began to gather behind it, a sense of purpose and vision that surpassed that of so many other acts. As though Citron examined thoughts and feelings a little deeper. Refused to write off wistfulness and melancholy as a vestigial adolescent charm. What if the past is so alluring because it promised something that never came to pass? What if a better future is possible?
Last month saw the release of a brand new full-length, life like moving pictures, and the effect is even more apparent. Again released by Joy Void, the album is described as the last chapter of a book that started with if i got smaller…, serving not only as a conclusion but a summation of what bedbug has come to mean over the previous few years, and the clearest communication yet as to what it stands for. A vehicle for forces both personal and political, a project that understands there is no distinction between the two.
The whole thing exists in a kind of wistful flux, like that feeling of watching the seasons change from a quiet window. From the tender slo-mo emo of opener ‘summer mixtape’ to the ramshackle folky vibes of ‘birds nest’, bedbug builds unassuming but heartfelt monuments to a present that has one eye on the future and another on the past. The songs are always gentle, always fluid and pliable, probing hopes and thoughts and experiences with a diarist’s candor and a poet’s heart. And even at their most personal, bedbug radiates a sense of empathy that glows like the “new type of beauty called game boy lights hidden under pillows” that they mention on ‘love & everything after.’ A concern for not just their own feelings but everyone else’s.
Which brings us back to the original point. Because although life like moving pictures is not necessarily a “political” record, it recognises that anything truly personal written in the age of late capitalism kinda has to be. Such themes usually remain implicit (the audio samples on ‘autumn mixtape’ and ‘winter mixtape’ being obvious exceptions), but they are ingrained in the images of unseasonable snow and PepsiCo and careless landlords and the endless dreams of a simpler life in nature.
