Bad History Month shared the first single from their new LP Old Blues earlier this month, and you’re probably still listening to it (this is a joke about how long the song is). When you’re finished with it, though, Sean Sprecher’s second cut from his second album under the moniker (née Fat History Month) drops today in a blaze of misanthropy and self-consciousness.
Reprising his role as the David Berman of some eerily familiar parallel timeline, “A Survey of Cosmic Repulsion” is both funny and tragic (“An uncanny valley filled with beer yawns between us,” Sprecher deadpans), while remaining utterly poetic, if not totally exhausted (“Maybe it’s impossible to bridge this cosmic gap / Maybe all there is is sex and other traps and brief distractions”).
“Ideologically, the undisputed status of the sayings ‘Distance makes the heart grow fonder’ and ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ seemed to indicate that I’m not too far removed from the norm when it comes to proximity-induced misanthropy,” Sprecher shares. “Conversely, love exists to be shared and all bodies are beautiful.”
Of the way the borderline-playful opening riff gets swallowed by a familiarly cosmic swirl of instruments, he reveals that “the jaunty opening riff started out as a melodic retaliation aimed at an annoying neighbor blasting Grateful Dead jams out their window.”
Old Blues is out April 24 via Exploding in Sound—pre-order it here. Catch BHM introduce the album on Exploding in Sound’s IG Live on April 21 at 4 p.m.
