It’s not as hard as it seems to join the revolution from your bedroom. On their most recent project, Life Like Moving Pictures, Dylan Citron (aka bedbug) does not miss the opportunity to radicalize their audience. Underneath a rain-on-your-window, scratchy bedroom pop facade, Boston local bedbug utilizes mixtape-style interludes to infuse their art with anti-capitalist speeches and ideals. To captivate a listener with honest bedroom pop is hard enough, but to expose that encapsulated listener to the world’s plagues requires courage and conviction. It would be easy for Life Like Moving Pictures to exist as a sad winter tape from an Allston apartment, safe to stream all day once daylight savings hits. At its core it is that tape, and it does an excellent job of being a warm, crackly, nostalgic piece. But it also goes beyond that, adding a layer of necessary politicization to your seasonal affective disorder. Life Like Moving Pictures is a safety blanket, one that even at its coziest gently reminds you what must be done.
Life Like Moving Pictures was released in August through Joy Void. It fills the space of a continued quarantine, and will only gain traction as we reach the culmination of a year filled with radicalization and a collective mental health struggle. Top tracks include “Birds Nest” and “Life Like Bigger Screens,” both honest odes to fleeting existence. Also on theme, “Winter Mixtape” (one of four seasonal interludes) runs as a sample of communist musings on the individual death, how it doesn’t matter.
We’ve been keeping up with bedbug for a bit now, at DAP and beyond. Linked to their media presence is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, so it feels right to encourage you, dear reader, to check it out as well. Also take a look at our past review here, and make sure to give Life Like Moving Pictures a few thorough listens.