TUNES // Bartees Strange – Boomer
Post by Misha
Boomer is an unrelenting thrill. There’s no way around it. If you pulled it apart very carefully, untangling each twist and turn from the last, you’d end up with about five really great songs, each a distinct feat of genre and style. The skill with which they have been woven together here – smashed together, melted together, planted and grown together like tangled tree roots – is simply breathtaking. Three minutes and seventeen seconds has never gone by so fast.
I first heard this song on a preview sampler from No Earbuds a year or so back. It was immediately electrifying, the kind of song that jolts itself into your system and demands endless repeats. The link to the sampler eventually expired, but the song’s itch stayed with me and every few months it popped into my mind and I’d try to remember the chorus, struggle to recreate its energy in my mind.
I actually often imagined playing Boomer in the real world when it finally came out. In my head, I drove through Silverlake Junction blaring it from open windows in the Los Angeles sun. I imagined putting it on a playlist for my birthday party and having friends come up and ask what was playing. I looked forward to its energy infusing the air with a sense of camaraderie and community. Funny how life works.
Instead, on the morning Boomer came out I found myself holed up in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, waiting out a global pandemic and generally avoiding people. I don’t have a car anymore, so windows-down music blaring is out. Birthday parties are similarly impractical.
Still, seeing this release come up on my timeline reminded me of what it’s like to get really, unreservedly excited about something. I ran over to my partner, who was working, and asked if he would listen to a song with me. We sat in our little living room, bobbing our heads along to the galloping drums, but it didn’t take long for him to take my hand and pull me off the couch. ‘Boomer’ is a song that welcomes movement – demands it, really. We jumped and wiggled and spun around. We turned it up. We played it again.
Boomer feels like the antithesis to the walled-in nature of this summer. It is unrestrained in every way. Without proscription. It is big, playful, surprising, full of love and a little something with which to steel one’s self against the dread.
Buy Boomer here (and preorder Bartees Strange’s upcoming album, Live Forever, out on Oct 2).