Live at Leeds Irish Centre: Bodega

“Post-punk is conceptual punk, so that lent itself to our thing early on,” says Hozie, “but at the end of the day, it’s about our songwriting.”

Truthfully, the post-punk tag hasn’t been apt for some time now. Our Brand Could Be Your Life, a rerecording of a 2015 album by an earlier incarnation of the group called Bodega Bay, was more inspired by classic indie rock bands like Pavement and Guided By Voices. Last year’s Rot in Helvetica, by the group’s alter ego NODEGA, saw them go in the opposite direction, delving into the sound of classic hardcore punk like Black Flag and 7 Seconds.

BODEGA’s new album, All Inside Aquarium, sees the band stray further than ever from these post-punk origins. The group’s goal was, “Let's go back to melodic tunes, let's be more of a proper rock band,” Hozie explains. Sonically, the band aimed for “this late ‘80s/early ‘90s Stone Roses-meets-Jane’s Addiction thing, with more riffing and guitar solos.”

The latter, in particular, were a major influence (Jane’s Addiction have been Hozie’s favorite band since high school), and there is indeed a palpable “Lollapalooza ‘91 Main Stage” vibe to the proceedings. “We were aiming at something larger, warmer, watery, and metaphysical, inspired by the optimistic alt rock of our half-remembered youth,” he notes. The album’s lush, grungy production harkens back to Alternative Nation arena-isms of Siamese Dream, Definitely Maybe, One Hot Minute, even Achtung Baby, while the band’s commitment to Beatle-esque pop craft keeps everything rooted in hook-y pop song structures, with sing-along choruses and middle-eights galore.

“The way that we listen to music is so eclectic, and that’s how we approached this album too,” says singer and percussionist Nikki Belfiglio. “You can have a hardcore song next to a folk song, because there’s no punks on the corner waiting to beat you up.” To wit, the album includes BODEGA’s radical reinvention of Bob Dylan’s “Slow Train,” the title track from his unfairly maligned 1979 album of the same name, which is about as far from post-punk as one can get. Hozie cites the glammy, Navarro-esque solo on that track as one of his favorite moments on the album.

Where BODEGA’s previous LPs were largely recorded piecemeal, with the band members rarely in the same room, signing to Chrysalis Records (Pere Ubu, Jethro Tull) gave them the ability to log serious studio time as a unit. The group spent a month and a half in the UK working with producer Matt Peel (Yard Act, Eagulls) at the Nave, his studio set up in a deconsecrated church in Leeds. They played live, successfully capturing the energy of their shows in a way that previous albums hadn’t quite nailed. The album was then mixed in Brighton with Theo Verney (English Teacher, Lime Garden).

Where the band’s earlier material took a more explicitly sociopolitical bent, Hozie and Belfiglio’s writing on All Inside Aquarium is deliberately less didactic and more concerned with poetics.

For Hozie, “If there's one thesis song, it would be ‘Literary World.’ It’s kind of a playful tune, but it's really about how what we're lacking is not political consciousness - because one of the most amazing things post-2016 is that the whole world has developed a political consciousness - but literary or poetic consciousness. A literary perspective is an empathetic one, because if you're a novelist, you have to understand the thinking of all of your characters, even if they're the most egregious people.”

“Pick Up the Check,” the album’s first single, exemplifies this approach. “The lyrics are imagining you're at a restaurant with somebody, either on a romantic date or some kind of business date with a music industry person,” Hozie says, “and you have to learn how to say no, stick up for yourself, and pick up the check. Even if you can't afford it, put it on credit and get out of there!” Still, Hozie emphasizes that “I always think of our songwriting as sort of Socratic. We're asking questions.”

Belfiglio explains that her song “Weather Me,” is “about living in an information kaleidoscope full of everyday grievances alongside very real problems. If you don’t know who or what to prioritize, this kaleidoscope can fracture your everyday existence.”

BODEGA’s newfound focus on poetics also resulted in some of the most personal material to date. “I had this epiphany that on earlier LP’s, I thought of my rock tunes and my ballads as two separate categories. I realized that I mostly only delved into personal material on ballads,” Hozie says, “So I was like, ‘Why couldn't I write something emotionally direct and personal in a fast rock song?’”

Hozie’s “Astro Night Ride” “is about my mom, who died in 2017. Five years later, when I was really trying to process what happened for the first time, I started having all these dreams where she would show up, and it was always at amusement parks. We’d be riding coasters together, which is a childhood memory of one of the few times where the family was all together and happy and blissed out. I’d always wake up with tears in my eyes and in such a good mood.”

The song’s construction was “self-consciously almost a prog rock thing. I wanted the arrangement to map out a roller coaster ride,” with sections that speed up and slow down, building and releasing tension. “I was trying to create a song that is both deeply personal, but also kind of an anthem, and one that's borderline naive, from a kid's point of view.”

Similarly, Belfiglio’s “Olivia,” about her cousin who tragically passed in 2010, “is the most personal song that I've ever written.” Olivia Belfiglio was just seventeen when, hiking a treacherous Catskills trail in sandals, she slipped and fell 100 feet to her death.

“I was at her grave, and I just started singing the song, thinking of things. I got the whole melody and the first three verses right in one go. There's a lot of magical feelings around this song for me.”

“Pain, after it subsides, can bring you closer to a beatific perspective,” Hozie says, where “you remember all is connected and paradoxically emerge more yourself despite recognizing you are a mere flake in the fish-tank of cosmic oneness.” He’s speaking here specifically about the meaning of the album’s anthemic, aquatically-oriented title track, but it’s a perfect distillation of where BODEGA are at, and something we’d all do well to remember. “Nobody can really mess with your head except yourself when you take responsibility for your reality,” he says.

Sonics aside, such a perspective is truly post-punk. Because this is what it looks like to grow beyond the righteous rage of youthful punk: An embrace of maturity, a sense of personal and interpersonal accountability, creative ambition, an open mind, an open heart, and the readiness to reinvent. That’s what All Inside Aquarium is all about.