Bodywash
I Held the Shape While I Could
LIGHT ORGAN
In retrospect, the title of the first Bodywash record could have come with a question mark. 2019’s Comforter found the Montreal dream-pop band spreading out soft synths and guitars like dryer-fresh quilts, but co-vocalist Rosie Long Decter also wanted to make shoegaze that wouldn’t just soothe. “I hope the title gestures towards the multiple implications of comfort,” she said at the time. “Is it necessarily a good thing to be comforting? Where is the line between being comforting and being numbing? And what does it mean to be someone's comforter—to be providing support without really fixing or changing a problematic dynamic?”
On the follow-up, I Held the Shape While I Could, Bodywash levels up by building more of that tension and unease into the sound of the songs themselves. Their lineup has slimmed down to a duo—Long Decter and founding songwriting partner Chris Steward, with studio contributions from drummer Ryan White and The Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek stepping in as engineer—and with a couple more years to lie in the bed they made, the two have gotten more adept at capturing the wrinkles. The record’s first track, “In as Far,” shows their hand: from a blanket of airy keyboard tones and vocal “oohs,” a booming breakbeat juts up by surprise. Sonic comfort teased, sonic comfort subverted.
From there, Shape rolls on through deeper-carved grooves and higher peaks than its predecessor. No groove cuts deeper than “Massif Central,” with its acoustic guitar and snappy snare rim tapping providing the kind of tactile touches that separate a great dream-pop track from a merely ethereal tune. And no peak stands higher than “Perfect Blue,” with the band’s best hook yet and a quiet-loud-quiet cycle built on impossibly craggy fuzz guitar. I grin reflexively every time the distortion smashes back in, and I’ve been singing the chorus to my cats on and off for the past month.
Long Decter introduced the record’s first single “Kind of Light” as a song about “learning not to trust what feels like home,” and the full tracklist bears out the lesson as Bodywash moves from instrumental interludes (“Bas Relief”) to spoken word pieces (“One Day Clear”) to synthy pop songs reminiscent of Alvvays or even CHVRCHES (“Ascents”). You might prefer the duo hold some of those shapes longer than others, but from song to song, without fail, they avoid one sophomore record pitfall: they always keep from getting too comfortable.
