by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
Birthmarks is the sort of beast that slithers rather than stalks. Where Bambara’s previous efforts have been marked by distinct country air—backroads, out-of-town pit stops, decaying towns—Birthmarks is an album of people, of unreliable narrators and recurring failures. With their last EP Love On My Mind, the band signaled a move towards the big city. Birthmarks is a novel in musical form, though one of a distinctly different nature. This is not a story in which the shock comes from a murderer hiding in the closet or a lover suddenly sprawled across the train tracks. Every horror is upfront, and the cyclical failure creates terror.
Bambara has always been an unsettling band. They carry the torch of noir-ish punk blues pioneered by Melbourne’s twin gaunt goths Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard. Bambara’s tangled country-inspired noise riffs, passionate vocal delivery, and Reid Bateh’s excellent lyricism makes Bambara’s affinity with those artists quite clear. While Birthmarks maintains that connection in its swaggering intensity and grim storytelling, it is sonically an entirely new proposal. Of course, Bambara has never been afraid of evolution; 2020’s Stray suggested a shift towards atmospherics in the brilliant Lynchian ballads it tucked between noise rock thrashers, and 2022’s Love On My Mind emphasised distortion as a room filler rather than ear piercer. Birthmarks seems to exist in an entirely new dimension.
From top to bottom, every element appears re-emphasised thanks to the production work of Bark Psychosis’s Graham Sutton. Where the bass once offered a battering rhythm, it now aches through the tracks like a ghost. On opener “Hiss,” it coils around the drums and bursts of guitar feedback like a snake coiling around the listener’s throat. The drumming has dialed back in aggression as well, taking on a more groove-driven role, adding a subtle funk on “Holy Bones” and a claustrophobic industrial roll on “Dive shrine.” While the snarl has been somewhat lessened in the rhythm section, the opposite has occurred with the guitar itself. Gone are the usual twangy buzzsaw riffs in favour of guitar lines that twitch like sparking machinery. When a chord is played it appears as a dramatic wave of distortion—a sonic shriek in between the subtle disquiet of the grooves.
Birthmarks is an album of cinematic post-punk that seems to draw equally from the throbbing nightmares of industrial rock and the uncanny sensuality of trip-hop. Its narrative is an endless reverberation, while previous Bambara records stylistically recall Flannery O’Connor vignettes of rampaging southern cruelty, Birthmarks feels like a Faulkner novel. It shifts time, place, and perspective to show the reverberating effects of death and desire, telling a near endless tale of a desperate murderer, his lost love, and the woman unfortunate enough to resemble her.
This neurotic, obsessive, and fatal desire is what drives the album’s best moments home and chart an entirely new path for Bambara. It’s those small aching sections of desire on “Hiss” when the instruments fade and Bateh’s vocals harmonise with Emma Acs into a howl of love and pain. These moments are distinctly ornate, so brooding and gothic that in a lesser band’s hands they could appear ludicrous, but in Bambara’s they are sublime. It’s how these moments consistently land that marks Birthmarks as a genuine step forward rather than an ill-thought-out change in direction.