No Joy: Bugland Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Elsewhere in Bugland, White-Gluz pumps more and more—more texture, more ambience, many more kinds of guitar—into the songs until they’re super-juicy, then allows them to burst in a rush of good feelings. Even the less wide-eyed moments, as when the sustained tolling of “Bather in the Bloodcells” twists into something like an alt-rock version of Madonna circa Paradise Garage, are perfumed by the album’s prevailing senses of joy and gratitude. It’s thrilling to hear someone embrace pleasure so wholly, yet that grounding means the album ends up somewhere near the kind of baggy indie-dance hybrid that few people have credibly attempted since Curve and Garbage invented it 30 years ago.

In her own records, Marcloid uses plonking new-age synths—picture the best preset on the most expensive keyboard at the oldest mall in your town—with black-metal shrieks and Weather Channel jazz in a way that feels both uncanny and caked in the dust of an imaginary past. So many of the sounds both she and White-Gluz deploy are now often reverse-read as cheesy and consciously era-specific, including the chunky, photorealistic guitars that, despite coming back into style recently, were seen as passé in the days of garage-rock authenticity and slimy post-punk. But like all ideas that attach themselves to an age, they were at the time used in great earnest, as a sincere attempt at expression. White-Gluz and Marcloid know this, too, and they often use that knowingness—both theirs and the audience’s—to their advantage. When “Jelly Meadow Bright,” the album’s noisiest track, brings together smooth-jazz sax, cherubim and seraphim vocals, Glassworks-style sequencer overloads, and grunting nü-metal guitar, the majesty it finally reaches is inseparable from both the emotional valences of those sounds and our knowledge of their collective datedness; it’s the music that plays when your life flashes before your eyes.

Is that description a little much? Yes, of course it is. But the presence of subtlety doesn’t necessarily make something artful, just as bombast and accessibility don’t make it brainless. Taking in Bugland’s spree of bright colors and surprise twists can feel like breaking a piñata onto the crazy-pattern carpet in the laser-tag arena: There is so much happening, and nearly all of it commands your attention. Memory fades, opportunity seems to narrow as we age, and a gnawing sense of futility overwhelms it all. Not so much an escape as a reminder, Bugland says, “Remember what it felt like to be pleasantly overwhelmed?”