Bent Knee – Twenty Pills Without Water | Album Review
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Take This To Heart Records
You can never go home again. Some variation of this phrase has haunted me since migrating to the opposite end of the country immediately after completing high school in Alabama. It cut particularly deep in the throes of a pandemic while holed up in an apartment in a new city where the only person I knew was my aunt. Even after COVID restrictions had loosened and I visited my hometown a handful of times, the chokehold that phrase has yet to let up. My memories are all I have, but those are just snapshots of a place that is constantly growing at an ever-quickening pace, with new buildings and businesses replacing the ones I know while most of the people who helped me bear it for ten years have made migrations of their own. Even the house I grew up in is wildly different, as anyone who's left home for any extended period will recognize. This inability to return to a previous status quo is a universal experience, albeit one that weighs heavier on some than it does on others. If their new album is any indication, it’s been a similarly heavy load on Bent Knee.
Few bands in the independent circuit have covered as much ground in the last fifteen years as Bent Knee. Since their 2011 debut, the Boston natives have folded everything from string-heavy art pop and prog to crushing stoner rock riffs into their arsenal in a way that’s made them impossible to put in any one box. The one true anchor is Courtney Swain’s formidable vocal ability, with her bright soprano and mind-melting belts imbuing all their music with an undeniable sense of scale and melodrama. Their previous outing, 2021’s Frosting, saw them push that sound to the limit with their most heavily synthetic palette, yet as they took a plunge into the sounds of hyperpop that would have seen most bands falling flat on their faces. Against all odds though, their commitment to the style’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink maximalism yielded plenty of winners in the tracklist; it’s home to both some of their zaniest and most emotionally direct material to date.
That said, Frosting was also the first time you might accuse the band of biting off a little more than they could chew. It’s a good but flawed record, sometimes feeling caught between too many ideas to coalesce into a satisfying experience. By comparison, Twenty Pills Without Water sees the band scaling back in favor of a more cohesive vision. The impossible desire to return to the way things were courses underneath nearly every moment, something that seems surprising from a band as ever-evolving as Bent Knee. With context though, it’s not difficult to guess why this might have weighed heavy on their mind. While this is their seventh album as a band, it is their first record as a four-piece, having parted ways with bassist Jessica Kion and lead guitarist Ben Levin, both of whom had been with the group since 2009 and left in 2022. Even though the separation was amicable, with the members citing the difficulties of being a touring musician, I can only imagine this was a significant loss for an outfit as creative and ambitious as this one.
Rather than hide those feelings to prove that they’ve “still got it,” Bent Knee make the choice to soak this cocktail of uncertainty in and share the journey with their audience. After a scene-setting intro full of clinking and clattering, the hypnotic thundering of drums and mantra-like wails on “Forest” signal a triumphant return to a classic Bent Knee sound on the surface, but the foreboding atmosphere that hangs over the track like a fog indicates otherwise. It even threatens to overtake Courtney Swain as she’s consumed by echoes and forgotten voices. This fog rests over every part of the record, only ever lifting when the band can no longer keep in the nagging feeling that something is wrong. Every song plays like a waiting game of how long they can swallow their emotions before they leak or, in some cases, burst out. This is the sound of a group that is lost in the woods and knows it. They continue to trudge forward because within that forest resides not only the most morose and pensive material of their career but also some of the most beautiful and affirming.
Many songs start this search with a distraction. “I Like It” seeks comfort in shared desire between two partners over skittering drum machines and a lush string section courtesy of guitarist/violinist Chris Baum. The song soon underlines that pleasure with a bitter sting as the playful chorus concludes a list of would-be turn-ons with “I like it when you swear that you’re never coming home.” On lead single “Illiterate,” Swain responds to outside criticism and pressure with self-soothing late-night binges that stretch progressively further into the morning. The song’s chopped-up riff and stop-and-start build induce a nervous tension throughout the verses that each chorus has a harder time relieving, with Swain howling about how she’s not sure if she’s crying, “but it’s okay!” by the final refrain. It’s a hollow comfort that I’ve become all too familiar with through my own various attempts to escape into fiction or any art that offers an alternative to my present state. There are well-defined rules and characters you can know in and out as an observer, unlike the chaos of waking life that still waits at the end of an episode.
Another song whose coping mechanism hits eerily close to home is “Never Coming Home,” revolving around a late-night drive with no clear destination. I often found myself on similar trips when I still lived in Alabama. I would waste gas exploring the twists, turns, and highways that crisscrossed my county with my stereo on blast, driving anywhere but home. At the time, I thought I was just making sure I could finish whatever song or album I was singing along to, but on some level, this was when I was able to most enjoy myself as a teenager. I didn’t have to think so much about where I was or what anybody thought of me; I could just move and sing. The bouncy, light-on-its-feet production courtesy of bassist Vince Welch manages to bottle that freedom in a smooth synth-pop jam while still capturing how bittersweet those rides were, with Swain expressing doubt and a need to escape at every turn in the lyrics. Unlike previous tracks however, she almost finds it, not in her words, but in the music, with the band cruising beyond the city limits and into a spacious horizon by the end. She may not know where she’s going, but it sure as hell isn’t backwards.
That lack of direction can be just as oppressive as it is liberating. Take “Big Bagel Manifesto,” which sees the band at their most abstract, with Swain letting emotion rather than words guide her voice through a foreboding intro made up almost entirely of strings. The lyrics are nearly nonexistent, with the liner notes reading more like suggestions in the first half and willfully nonsensical in the second. The only clear anchor here is the pitched-up refrain of “Heads up, everybody sucks!” filling out the body of the song along with the rhythm section as the crooning reaches a fever pitch. The elusive nature of the song frustrated me at first, only clicking into place when I let go of concrete interpretation and let myself be guided by the one emotion that comes across clear as day: confusion. Bent Knee have never been ones to make their lyrics especially obvious, so the tilt into a borderline mood piece is an effective one, especially with the cumulative muscle of the band and several guest musicians expertly overwhelming me once the song kicks into gear. It feels like a sister to the despondent “Drowning” later in the tracklist, an appropriately titled song that wallows in uncertainty and frayed lines of communication. It’s far and away the prettiest song on Twenty Pills, with Baum’s violin leading an ever-growing mini-string symphony over keys that glitter like sunlight on water, but also the emotional rock bottom as Swain sings of literally sinking by the end.
One always seems to be right
To swim to survive
But I sank with the tide
So see if I care
As with most rock bottoms though, it’s from here that some resolution begins to take shape. Bent Knee have always sounded mighty and confident on past records, if also a little unknowable, consistently leaving me in a state of awe. Twenty Pills is the first time that hasn’t been the case, but leave it to Bent Knee to turn that weakness into a strength. “Lawnmower” was the first song the band released as a quartet, coming out in May of last year, and pretty transparently addresses a parting of ways.
Seventeen years in the dirt
We ought to live it up
If this is all we got
Honestly I know
We have to say goodbye sometimes
With a stripped-back build reminiscent of many current indie folk darlings, it’s a strikingly candid song from a band that I’m used to sounding out of this world. It was already a high point for the record, but it didn’t click into place how important this song is for the band until seeing them perform it at their Portland concert earlier this month. It was a small venue, not exactly packed to the brim, but everyone seemed to be such massive supporters of the band, with the band shouting out specific audience members and touring partners who made their shows possible. With every added instrument, it felt like a collective weight was being lifted until the song’s explosive finish had everyone around me floating. It reminded me of the penultimate song on the album, the mysteriously titled “DLWTSB,” another synth-led, Prince-inspired romp that stuffs in a host of cliches about overcoming adversity that it can feel a bit cheesy. After an album full of doubt and fear chased with the experience I had seeing them live, I can’t help but feel the band’s earned a fair portion of cheese when the song finds its groove and Swain defiantly asserts that “Underdogs gotta stick together when we can.” Sure, it could be just another coping mechanism, a retreat into easy platitudes, but comfort can lead to healing and, beyond that, growth. I can’t say for sure if the band has made it out of the woods yet, just as none of us can ever truly say the same for our own forests, but they’ve paved a road behind them so that others may follow and a select few already have. That road’s destination may seem unclear, but to borrow from another well-worn cliche, it’s the journey that matters anyway.
Wesley Cochran lives in Portland, OR where he works, writes, and enjoys keeping up with music of all kinds, with a particular fondness for indie rock. You can find him @ohcompassion on Twitter, via his email electricalmess@gmail.com, or at any Wilco show in the Pacific Northwest.
