21 Aug 2013 — Trey Reis
Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk have been a whirlwind to follow since I first saw them as a kind of noisy four-piece indie rock band in my brother’s basement in Boone, Iowa. They were a band from Lawrence, Kansas whom I had never heard of, who later made their way to New York, via Chicago for a brief period. The next opportunity I had to see the band was probably three years later in the campus chapel at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and they had transformed into the three-piece grandiose, tribal noise act, huddled over heaps of effect pedals and cords on rugs on the floor, that they have, seemingly, been working toward since they began making music. Which is to say that their most recent album, Think Tone, out on Brooklyn’s Fire Talk label, is their most realized work to date.
Their first proper full-length, 2008’s Eek Shriek Beak, was a soft exploration of sounds still recognizable through the bands subtle effects processing, like Campfire Songs-era Animal Collective recording in a basement with electronics. Following a string of smaller releases on labels throughout the country, BBDDM released their second full-length album (and first Fire Talk release), Skeletor & Me. The guys in the band specifically said that it felt like more of an album than anything they had done previously. I remember feeling surprised, thinking about how the flow and soft transitions of Eek Shriek Beak felt so whole to me, and how that feeling only grew with every listen.
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But Skeletor & Me represented an entire shift in the band’s sound: one that called back too much of what I remember seeing in that basement in small town Iowa. It was something heavier and bigger. Something buried in layers of earth, rather than pools of water. And as I listened, each of the album's five songs began to feel more and more like movements, rather than collected songs. The walls of soft distortion rearing back before every towering drum hit and indiscernible bellow. The gentle ringing connecting the tracks of Eek Shriek Beak, had moved into something much darker and more affected: something that moved upward, rather than softly pulsing outward.
With Think Tone, every step the band has taken up to this point is heard. The dichotomy of their past albums makes sense individually as two parts which, when combined, created the new album. The driving force is certainly the pulsing walls of sound in each of Skeletor & Me’s five tracks, but the perked ear for Eek Shriek Beak’s glistening high-end lends itself to some of the top layers this time through. This added softness is most clear on the album opener “What Am I Doing With My Life” which moves forward with, almost entirely, the same acoustic tendencies. The first single, “Saturday”, is when the circle really completes itself, as highly effected electric guitars strummed like acoustic exhale and inhale increasingly larger breathes as the song progresses, and vocal tosses rise and fall, like bubbles climbing underwater and popping when they hit the surface.
The lighter tendencies continue to twirl and mix with the heaviness at the bottom of each track as the album moves into “Let’s Listen to Souvlaki and Make Out” and “Burt”, the two tracks sandwiching the 10-minute noise-jam breather “I’ve Been Thinking A Lot About the Universe”, which, all-together, bring the album’s second half to a close. The same guitar strums from earlier become less buried and carry the album on some of its highest waves, most notably the BBDDM sweeping take on surf guitar in “Souvlaki”, mirrored by the layers of harmonized vocals like a Beach Boys single played at 33rpm in “Burt.”
If praise for Think Tone indicates any of the previous albums' lacking, it is only because the combined weight of experience and BBDDM’s wide range of experimentation throughout the years has led them to an entirely different level of sound-processing: one entirely unreachable without the complete thoroughness of differing directions of exploration undertaken by each of their two primary, previous albums.
Listen to the entire LP below and get it over here.
