“Check it out / Jumping over a big hole in the concrete / Who knows how deep,” opens ‘Check it out’, the first song on Bugcatcher‘s latest album Go! “I double dog dare you / Take a peak if you’re not scared to / Maybe the devil’s down there.” Six lines which not only set up the rest of the album but capture something of the project’s spirit. A combination of sincerity and whimsy delivered with an understated tone yet marked by a pervading sense of mystery, as though below the mundane surface of things exists an untold manner of possibility, a source of both wonder and unease.
The recording project of Rochester‘s Jake Denning and a variety of friends, Bugcatcher introduced the vibe with 2021 EP Fictional Witches before following up a year later with full-length Slacker, with songs like ‘Birthday Car Thief’ and ‘Daisy vs. The Grim Reaper’ proving that endlessly inventive songs can be succinct at the same time. Go! builds upon these foundations with real confidence. Denning moves deftly between wide-ranging themes and images, from the opening devil hole to a tale of a Roswell-esque crash site in the extraterrestrial ‘Contact’, and then ‘Desert’, which we described in a preview as “a song which both serves as an ode to the titular landscape and a search for meaning within an otherwise barren milieu.” Or indeed between styles, with sedate bedroom pop numbers like ‘Animal’ chased by the pressing indie rock of ‘Dirt’.
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And so the album continues in this manner. Strange phenomena leak into the quotidian, and likewise the quotidian shines through in even the strangest scenarios. The close encounter of ‘Contact’ (“An open hatch like some old hoax / Silence came over, humming nervousness / I can see them through the smoke”) is nevertheless accompanied by a thought of what the boys back home are going to think, while ‘Washing Machine’ presents a seemingly normal story about a lost set of keys but soon morphs into something altogether more supernatural.
I heard her cry
When you picked up the phone
Said theres ghosts on the highway
Following my chevy homeI met my girl
Where the blue sky swirls
Can you hear those ghosts a-singin’?
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Though for all of its playful weirdness, there’s no small amount of earnestness to the Bugcatcher sound. Even the sly slacker rock of ‘Split’ has considerable vulnerability beneath the buoyant surface (“I split my lip right open / And all the kids thought there had been a fight / Didn’t have the gall to say it was a fall”), while songs like closer ‘Go don’t go’ embrace this tenderness more overtly. Here the lyrics are stripped back to almost opaque poetry, finding the strange sensations of previous tracks through the general atmosphere. A slow warbling waltz that unfurls with an almost sublime shimmer.
Go, don’t go
You make a show
And I see the highs
And lows you know
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Go! is out now and available from the Bugcatcher Bandcamp page.