Babe Report
Did You Get Better
EXPLODING IN SOUND
It wasn’t too long ago when aspiring DIY musicians would hole up in their bedroom and commit raw fragments of potential songs onto a four-track cassette recorder. Before the Internet Age, these charmingly insecure musicians would circulate their tapes among trusted friends and mail them to their favorite boutique record labels in the hopes of getting signed. In the spirit of noted four-track recluses—Lou Barlow, Daniel Johnston, and Bob Pollard, to name a few—Chicago guitarist/vocalists Ben Grigg and Emily Bernstein incepted their band Babe Report effectively in private, during COVID lockdown. Confident that even their first batch of material was potentially strong enough to take them places, the duo swelled Babe Report’s ranks with a bassist named Mech and former Yeesh drummer Peter Reale.
Relatively quickly, Babe Report released their debut EP, The Future of Teeth, in April 2022. Still, their one-track minds were squarely focused on properly introducing themselves with a full-fledged studio album. Perhaps driven by frustrations with COVID-related delays, and also because they knew every nook and cranny of the 10-song platter, Babe Report recorded Did You Get Better at lighting speed in their basement studio over the course of a single weekend.
It’s no wonder that the album is a blue streak of a debut in which the band dashes through 10 songs in about 30 minutes. More punk in spirit than in sound, Did You Get Better provides constant reminders of Grigg and Bernstein’s love for lo-fi. On the one hand, “Universal,” “Kathleen,” and the album-closer “Bite My Lip” contain brief passages of clean, upbeat breaks from the rest of the album. However, those divergences are short-lived, as Babe Report’s guitarists eventually succumb to their distortion pedals.
Babe Report’s inability to restrain themselves from playing too fast and too loud, combined with their disinterest in experimenting with new sounds, is indicative of their primary predicament: an inability to be patient. Although Did You Get Better is a promising debut, there’s plenty of room for adjustment to let audiences get a clearer idea of the band they’re listening to. Everyone will be all the better for it.
