by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
If there’s a silver lining to this past year and a half it’s that we’ve seen plenty of interesting remote collaborations offer strange new fruit. Body Breaks, the duo of Toronto’s Julie Reich and Montreal’s Matt LeGroulx have made good use of their time at home, working together to create their debut album, Bad Trouble. Due out on June 18th via We Are Time Records, the band take a microtonal approach to what otherwise might be endearingly referred to as “slacker” rock. The songs are loose and jangly but the tunings are the sonic focus, always askew, informing the sound in their own alternate world.
While Reich handles the vocals on the band’s first two singles (“Between The Heart and The Mind” and “Eyes to Brightness”) and the rest of the record, “Break The Icons Down” is the outlier, the sole song sung by LeGrouix, a strong effort at that. The microtonality is often what is first noticed in any Body Breaks song, and this one is no different. It instantly transports us to a disorienting place which is only propelled by the wonderfully trippy animated video courtesy of Dr. Cool a.k.a. Jordan Minkoff. The song seems to reflect on the theme of keeping technology away from our being, but that fear is delivered void of tension. Body Breaks ride the woozy melody into a whimsical territory, one that feels passive and even optimistic.
Speaking about the song, Matt LeGroulx shared:
“‘Break The Icons Down’ was written while I was out on tour with my friend's band Chairs. I had been working with quarter tones and didn't want to stop for two weeks so I brought a classical guitar that I had strung up with two sets of G, B, and E strings tuned a quarter tone apart. If I remember correctly I wrote that song in Hamilton but somehow managed to remember it until I got home. It's the only song on the album that uses one guitar tuned in quarter tones rather than two guitars tuned a quarter tone apart. The lyrics aren't about anything in particular so feel free to construct your own meaning.”