BODEGA – Botanique Venue, Brussels – 12 February 2019

As I said before on repeat New York‘s dazzling hit-and-kick quintet BODEGA is one of
the most thrilling new bands around. They spit and sneer sharper and hookier than
their wide awake jingle jangle mentors Parquet Courts, they resonate like if Talking Heads and Tom Verlaine’s Television were rattling punks rather than exploring new wavers and they clatter as contagious as those British early 80s outsiders Delta 5 once did. Bodega‘s debut longplayer Endless Scroll, released last July, ended up as one of the best three albums of 2018 in Turn Up The Volume‘s list. A rollicking, astonishing record.

Yesterday in Brussels the New Yorkers did exactly what I expected. They turned up the heat, the audience’s adrenalin and their own uninterrupted vitality for a full hour. Nikki Belfiglio, one of the two vocalists, stole the show visually. In the middle of the stage, she hit one cymbal relentlessly with her rhythm stick while shouting and clamoring and dancing graciously all around the podium in between. Guitarist and main singer Ben Hozie is the electrical riff generator whose biting vocals cut like a Swiss knife and who turned ‘Truth
Is Not A Punishment‘ (the 2.49 min closing track of the album) into an almost 10 minutes trance like psychedelic jam with some terrifically frenzied help from second guitarist Madison Velding-Vandam . Quite surprising as most of their songs balance around the
2-minute mark, but it worked perfectly. They played a couple of new ones that fitted in smoothly but they got everybody going ballistic with yell along crowd-pleasers ‘Name Escape’, ‘Gyrate’, How Did This Happen’ and ‘I’m Not A Cinephile‘. Wham Bam! Electrifying performance! if you never heard of this motherrockers here’s an idea of their live vibrancy…

BODEGA: Facebook

The riff generator…

Thank you, Brussels…

Stream ENDLESS SCROLL here…

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(concert pics by Turn Up The Volume!)