With ‘Gimme 5!’ we take a peek into the collections of artists we admire. The premise is simple: artists WE like share five records THEY love.
This Friday, bedbug will release their fourth album “pack your bags, the sun is growing” at Disposable America.If you are looking for high quality indie rock with classic emo tendencies, make a mental note to check it out later this week.
Bedbug started out as a solo project by Dylan Gamez Citron, and the new album is their first full band studio recording. On the record, bedbug has retained the heart, intimacy and spontaneity of home recording, but the record also feels thoughtful, layered and varied and, honestly, I have a soft spot for the spine tingling guitar parts.
Leading up to the release, we reached out to bedbug founding member Dylan Gamez Citron to share their influences. Listen to one of the teaser tracks of “pack your bags, the sun is growing” – pre-order here, and continue below to read and listen to the 5 picks of Citron.
Dylan Gamez Citron: “As a music fan, I think I generally wear my heart on my sleeve (or… right under my sleeve, where I got a “Lonesome Crowded West” tattoo). When I fall for an album, I fall hard. However, while some of these have been canonized in indie rock, others have fallen off. They aren’t underrated by any means, but they don’t seem to have the same influence as they did when I first discovered them. So much untapped potential! So however you read into that, these are my top five of those records.”
1. A Sunny Day in Glasgow || Sea When Absent
“I love ambitious records. I love meticulously detailed records. I love when albums are so ambitious and meticulous that after a dozen listens, you can still discover new details. It’s why I loved Radiohead/Animal Collective as a teenager, and it’s why I was blown away the first time I heard the Brave Little Abacus. That being said, this album is the most ambitious and meticulous I’ve ever heard, bar none. It’s closer to a collection of sound collages than anything else. The key here is that each snippet of song you get is full of legitimately catchy pop hooks, shoegaze guitars and wild electronics. I can’t think of a single other album like it.”
2. Strange Ranger/Sioux Falls || Rot Forever
“This is a big one for me. For years I’ve been a huge fan of 90’s indie rock. My car in high school was full of Modest Mouse, Pavement, and Guided By Voices CD’s. I did like the more eclectic and weird indie rock of the 2000’s, but finding an album that could modernize and replicate that rough, 90’s sound would be a holy grail for me. Little did I know, there was a lot out there, especially in the burgeoning emo revival at the time. But for some reason, Rot Forever seemed to exist outside of the emo revival, taking less from Braid and Mineral and more from K Records bands like Lync and Built to Spill. Almost instantly it became a top 5 record for me. Like the 90’s greats, it never tries too hard, but behind the lackadaisical lyricism is some truly beautiful poetry.”
3. Julia Brown || An Abundance of Strawberries
“This is one of Bedbug’s biggest influences. That’s a conversation for another list though. In a perfect world, this would be considered one of the all-time greats. Every band would be trying to make a clone of it in some way. And yet, it’s not even the most popular of the two Julia Brown records. Remember what I said about ambitious records? This one is up there. It’s not even the last one on this list. It feels like some sort of bedroom/lofi opus for a genre that is completely undeserving of one.”
4. PS Eliot || Introverted Romance of Our Troubled Minds
“Hear me out. I know Waxahatchee is having a moment. I also know that she is killing it on the alt-country front. I also know that I’m on record as a pop punk hater. But for real, hear me out. This is fast, fun indie rock. More importantly, it’s extremely rough around the edges. The mix will not win any awards, but the energy certainly should. On top of this, Katie’s lyrics are overwrought and vacillate between the simplest of emotional descriptors to some erudite SAT vocabulary. More bands should stop worrying about sounding pretentious and start saying stuff like “and temperance engulfs your mind every time our aversion intertwines. it’s early morning and we’re both wide awake.””
5. Animal Collective || Feels
“Is this one fair? Animal Collective is the quintessential drug-rug addled college psychedelic indie rock band. They’re critically acclaimed! But they also fell off a little bit, in terms of cultural relevance. Sure, Merriweather Post Pavilion has great streaming numbers, but Feels doesn’t even have a single song on their top ten streams. Fleeting fans of the band might listen to Strawberry Jams, or a newer record, but many might pass over Feels completely. That’s criminal! Feels transports you to its own world. It’s weird, messy and beautiful. The instrumentation is warped and unintelligible. The line between acoustic and electronic is extremely blurred. In the end, it’s full of ideas that have not been replicated since. They should be!”