Bedbug – pack your bags the sun is growing | Album Review
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Disposable America
When you’re on a long drive by yourself, it’s incredibly hard to fight boredom. In the Midwest, in particular, you can drive for hours only passing fields with no definitive qualities other than that some have cows and some don’t. After a while, this sameness can start to feel like an onslaught.
One way to combat this is to get romantic about your surroundings. You tell yourself that each field you pass, each rundown barn, each water tower, has a story. People’s dreams have, at some point, been connected to them. You’re not driving through a boring landscape; you’re traveling through a space where people live and have lived. When you bring humanity to what you're passing, you feel connected to it. It makes things more bearable.
Bedbug’s new album, pack your bags the sun is growing, is a project that looks at the world through this lens. “I saw spirits on the highway driving home from your house,” Dylan Gamez Citron sings on the opening track “the city lights,” continuing, “built something crazy, could change it all for us, but what if there’s not much more than this.”
Throughout the rest of the album, Citron continues this kind of contemplation, connecting emotionally with abstract ideas and shapes like the sun's reflections, snowbanks, and the changing seasons. Driving, in particular, comes up a lot.
On “the great bonfire” they call dibs on shotgun before singing, “We were slow dancing cross interstate lines, we’ve done it for miles and hours pass and heaven abandons us.” In both this line and the one quoted earlier, driving is treated as meditative. It’s an act through which you can see spirits or feel a shift in the way the cosmos relate to you.
Leaning so heavily into driving as the mode for this type of reflection is an interesting choice. We more often see feelings like this inspired by looking up at the stars or taking in the vast ocean. These more traditional catalysts for introspection can also be found in places throughout the album, but they’re never elevated as more powerful than the reflections that come from something as seemingly mundane as a drive home.
This is made even more explicit on the album’s lead single, “halo on the interstate,” where we hear the line “light refracts on the dashboard of my car, gives me halos on the interstate, the turnpike looks like heaven.” To be able to view reflections on your dashboard with the reverence one views the stars in the sky is something special. It takes an uncommon type of emotional literacy, and it’s this quality that is one of Bedbug’s biggest strengths on the record.
Because the album is so lyrically rich, it is tempting to continue with just this type of analysis. There are so many themes that repeat throughout this record, exploring the emotional impact of living in a city and the use of sleep as a way to pass time more than to rest. To focus solely on the lyrics, though, would do pack your bags the sun is growing a disservice, as there’s so much beyond them deserving consideration.
“the city lights” is a great opener for this record because it introduces us to Bedbug’s new sound. The track opens with Citron’s vocals over clean guitar arpeggios and pronounced bass, and while we’ve certainly heard all these things together on past Bedbug records, we’ve never heard them come through with such width and clarity. At around thirty seconds, there’s a cymbal swell, and then at around a minute, we’re hit with a prominent, real, full drum kit.
This is the first record that Bedbug has recorded in-studio with a full band; as a whole, it feels like a step towards indie rock and away from bedroom pop (a genre Citron recently wrote a eulogy for) and a big part of this is the drums. In past Bedbug releases, the rhythm section has largely been filtered drum machines that ride along with softer vocals and guitar. That’s not the case here, with many of the songs featuring an unfiltered full kit sound from drummer Minerva Rodriguez that drives tracks forward, becoming an essential part of the mix. In particular, “The Great Bonfire!” features some great fills, and on “postcard,” it feels like a fuse has gone off when the drums kick in. This is still Bedbug; there are still the lo-fi bedroom pop qualities and great songwriting you’ve come to expect, it’s just bigger and clearer like you’re looking at Bedbug for the first time after cleaning off your glasses.
The change in sound feels like a natural progression for Citron, who, in interviews, has made clear their love and admiration for Modest Mouse. This influence has been more lyrical than sonic on past Bedbug projects, but here, it shines through in the production, particularly of the vocals. There’s definitely some Isaac Brock, especially in spots like “Postcard,” where the full band is propelling the songs to a place where Citron can let loose and sing with an intensity we didn’t see when they were working with just fuzzy acoustic guitar over lo-fi drum machines.
There’s a section in Citron’s genre eulogy where they talk about the newer music that apps like Spotify serve up to those searching for “bedroom pop.” This music often has the aesthetic of the genre without the ethic, sounding like, as Citron describes “studio-produced, groovy alt-pop, curated for Instagram stories and vibes TikToks.” This is a summation I don’t disagree with. There’s something uncanny valley-like about how the genre’s lo-fi qualities, largely born out of necessity, are now being mimicked by people purely trying to match a certain vibe.
Ultimately, this sort of thing is almost inevitable as any genre evolves. From an optimistic standpoint, these developments speak to the impact that earlier bedroom pop has had on new artists who feel inspired to take parts of the genre and move in a new direction. One thing that I like about pack your bags the sun is growing is that it represents a different way that one can take these influences and evolve. It’s a record where the intimate feel and introspective lyrics of bedroom pop are expanded with grander instrumentation and higher-res production. There are certainly some fuzzy/lo-fi elements throughout the record, but the pursuit of these qualities is not what’s driving things. It’s this purity of approach that sets this album apart from a lot of the other music in this space, making pack your bags the sun is growing an impactful work worth listening to.
Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. You can keep up with his writing on music and sports on Twitter and listen to his band Cutaway Car here.
