Bodies in Motion is the second album from Chicago’s Plum and from the opening bars of ‘Perfect’ it’s like stepping on the accelerator; 0-60 in under a second. If you are a fan of angular indie then you will be all in on this. If you wondered what a teleporter accident that mixed the DNA of Talking Heads’ Remain In Light and Gang of Four’s Solid Gold would be like, then wonder no more.
The band started writing the album on a retreat in Wisconsin and “spent days on intuitive and constraint-based approaches: songs emerged from Tarot card pulls, graphic scores, free vocal improvisations in the woods, and challenges thrown at one another, like writing a section with asymmetric phrasing or moving toward the ideas they’d normally avoid”. So much of the motion driving Bodies In Motion comes from new drummer Eric Ridder who they say “reinforced the band’s motorik pulse” allowing Jeff Kelley (guitar, lead vocals) and Heather Perry (bass, vocals) to dart in and out of the rhythm and create a conversation between all the instruments. You hear that in spades on ‘Can Jam’ and ‘Atmosphere’ which have the same energy as ‘Crosseyed and Painless’.
There is a subgenre of post-punk that brought funk and reggae into the mix, especially in the 1980s with bands like XTC, The Higsons, Orange Juice, and The Diagram Brothers, who were so sharp you could cut yourself on their music. it’s the same with Bodies In Motion, there are so many acute angles you might have to dig out your school geometry set to measure them. Guitars judder and jangle, the bass moves about restless and hypnotic, and the drums shift between super-taut metronomic time keeping, as in ‘Clearer in Memory’, and the nervy syncopation of ‘Not Out Of Mind’ which trades off splashy cymbals, rolling toms and snare flourishes.
Bodies In Motion is a pulse quickening blend of percussion, propulsion, and perspicacity. Plum are a jerky, zig-zagging moving target that even the keenest marksman would find it hard to hit. There is huge joy in their mercurial songwriting and they have a fierce ability to blend all those guitar, bass and drum angles into a cohesive geometric whole.
Plum: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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