Brighten The Corners Presents South Wales alternative indie trio The Bug Club on Friday 27th October at The Baths, with support from Getdown Services.
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Time: 7.30pm - 11pm
Venue: The Baths, Ipswich
Tickets: £13
Supports: Getdown Services
Age Restrictions: 14+ (14- 15s must be accompanied by an adult) -
After a live album (of new, one-off tracks) and an EP to get the year started at a leisurely pace, The Bug Club cap off 2023 with their second full-length album - an hour-and-a-bit long double LP called Rare Birds: Hour of Song. The first single, ‘Short And Round’, is released July 21st.
Their eighth release since joining forces with Bingo Records in summer 2020, 'Rare Birds...' is a culmination of a year spent relentlessly touring. But it's not one of those hackneyed road records. It's about birds, to an extent. Well, it is, and it isn't. And it is 47-songs long, featuring 23 Cutler-esque spoken-word tracks that weave through the music telling a surreal story to accompany the band’s usual witty, taut garage rock. Oh, and it comes with a fully illustrated, 32-page book.
Vocalist and guitarist Sam Willmett kind of attempts to explain: “All the songs were written in our summer holiday lull before we went away to tour (debut album) Green Dream in F♯ last year. Then we picked the lucky winners to go on the album when we got home around Christmas.
“We just wrote every day we were home, mostly in the garden. That’s probably why it's vaguely about birds. All the songs are in the order they were written apart from the last two which we swapped around.
We think the record is like a fall asleep relaxation tape with the cartoon ‘burd’ narrating and guiding you.”
‘Short and Round’ is The Bug Club at their most playful. Recalling The Soft Boys and The Kinks as much as their usual touchstones of The Moldy Peaches and The Modern Lovers, the track sees the band admiring an unnamed person’s barnet. And why not? They’re often worth admiring. It builds to a repetitive chorus before swaggering off with a solo they’ve chosen to fade out, just like they did on their debut single ‘We Don’t Need Room For Lovin’.
Support comes from Getdown Services.