After having posited his as one of the most attractive emerging talents on the recent underground scene and having breathed hope and life into our country’s independent guitar scene through some impeccably remarkable first EPs (“Delta” y “Fog”published respectively in 2019 and 2021), the quintet Bum Motion Club has taken the step forward that many of us expected and has finally signed his full-length debut with the help of “Clarity and Laurels” (23).
Under an excellent and impeccable line of continuity, the Aranjuez group has selected the best that it could offer us during the first stages of its professional start (the one that from time to time sneaked in songs sung in English and its sound drank directly from the oldest Anglo-Saxon pop and vaporous) and has managed to take it to a new instrumental and compositional level; more mature, more solid, but conceptually just as brilliant. Without the need to be involved in a process of artistic denaturalization that could have ended up distorting the steps they had already taken, the band now presents us with the eight songs corresponding to their first album, crediting with supine merit an applauded evolution that goes through taming and the control of their respective contributions (with Alejandro Leiva, the band’s guitarist, as the direct manager of their production) and rounds off the move with a disbelieving, skeptical and fateful speech that, in short, is generationally relevant.
It is revealed to us by her delicious personal dissatisfaction, a slave to a malevolent and merciless present that is manifested through verses that are painfully transversal and valid at any time, with free interpretation becoming collective and disagreement being her favorite commonplace (“Spain has abandoned you, Europe has mocked you / Stop wondering everything that would have happened”they sing in “Spain”). The verb that threads the different passages of this brief but effective LP are nothing more than the result of a process of conscious self-analysis from which diatribes as much theirs as ours are obtained (“Something is not working, it is far from right. “I don’t remember what I was like before losing this integrity, maybe it’s fear, self-esteem or anxiety / All the weight on the back of this generational trap,” sounds at the start of a captivating “Almost a Good Day”), reminding us of the urgency with which we live (“Hurry, Hurry”refer between references to Saura’s cinema) and letting us glimpse that in this particular struggle against the most vile and disastrous destiny, they are on our side (“Maybe the mud will come again,” They warn us between progressive keyboard lines in “Azul”, until finishing with an epic and unusual guitar solo, which clearly establishes itself as one of the most moving peaks of the album).
Of course, and as an archetypal moral of his work, there also ends up being light at the end of the tunnel (“I will break the windows that darken your house.”, they exclaim in “Affection and Sympathy”, scratching where it hurts most and tempting us with tears). An emotional and vivid outburst that pairs wonderfully with the thick warble of the four strings of Iris Banegas and the percussive viscerality of Pablo Salmerón, the crystalline and synthetic reflections of Alberto Aguilera and the no less energetic tirade of riffs by Leiva and the broken and meaningful verse by Pablo Vera. “The world made us like this”, they say; but they clearly demonstrate that they now have the necessary tools to continue facing any wind and tide thanks to an album whose only drawback is that it has an end.