Bodywash
“Guess I’m turning in / Into someone you can hold / Melt me down in your mold / There’s no turning back from that,” sings Chris Steward, opening Bodywash’s Laughing at Noise. The third LP from the Montreal duo is concerned with the twinned truths of stasis and change, as Steward and songwriting partner Rosie Long Decter take stock of the ambivalent feelings that have gathered behind them over a decade of making music. The duo, who started playing together in a dorm room practice space at university, are now in their early thirties. In that time, the city that nurtured their creative expression has become a markedly harsher place. Rents rise as brownfields are refashioned into real estate; DIY spaces wither in structural shadow; summer is hazier and heavier. How are we supposed to make a living, let alone build a life?
Laughing at Noise doesn’t indulge nostalgia or cynicism—rather, it sees Long Decter and Steward sorting through what it means to grow older and keep on with both wariness and wisdom. The duo’s previous LP, I Held the Shape While I Could, was swirling, elegant, elastic. As they began writing songs for what would come next, both Long Decter and Steward found themselves pulled toward a more stripped-back approach to songcraft. Steward was enamoured with acoustic guitar, and Long Decter was writing on guitar and bass rather than on keys. The songs that became Laughing at Noise are playful and worn-in, and the sound of the record follows suit. The album is rougher around the edges than previous Bodywash releases, trading an adherence to fidelity for a looser, noisier sound that developed over months of experimentation.
The duo produced the record over the course of a year at Autoland Audio in Montreal’s Parc-Ex neighbourhood, where they’d previously worked on their debut LP, 2019’s Comforter, and brought in Asher Gould-Murtagh for mixing duties (Shirley Hurt, Mother Tongues). The new LP inherits a palette of shoegaze and dream pop that’s been present since the beginning of Bodywash, but it also rhymes with a scrappier 90s indie rock sensibility in tone and point of view: you can hear it in the squall that ends “Widows’ Peak,” in the chiming guitar refrain motoring “Come and Go,” and in the down-tuned strum under “Pinup.” Laughing at Noise dials up the distortion and plugs into a genealogy of artists like Elliott Smith and Kim Gordon who chronicle modernity’s malaise.
Still, there are details that situate these songs in a particular slantwise, Montreal perspective—a point of view that, along with the record’s melodic pleasures, buoys it from world-weariness. On the dreamy single “Lapsang,” Steward sings, “I took the bus down the bike lane”—a snowglobe image of the city’s charming, unruly frustrations—before reflecting “I’ve lived around here for a long time.” On closing track “Overpass,” Long Decter observes that the “sun rises in the south in my city,” which might sound nonsensical if it weren’t so familiar to those who’ve navigated Montreal’s askew grid. These details punctuate songs that move with a patient sense for story.
Long Decter says that she might call Laughing at Noise the band’s “Montreal album.” The record embodies the sort of perspective on home that can only come with time. Steward echoes this idea: “The longer you stay somewhere, the more you become the yardstick against which everything is measured,” he says. Laughing at Noise finds the duo in tight form, working through these intimate, uneasy feelings of distance. As the lead guitar and drums pull back from “Overpass” one last time, Long Decter ties up the song’s birds-eye reflections with a line that lands like a stone: “Sometimes I am older / Sometimes we’re the same.”
