Track by Track: Bambara - Love On My Mind

Brothers Blaze and Reid Bateh run us through the new collection from Brooklyn post-punks, Bambara.

SLITHER IN THE RAIN
Reid: This song always had a strong visual vibe to it. Listening to demos early on, I would always see an image of a drunk man dancing near a runway while planes landed behind him. So the goal was to bring him to life in the song. This was a little bit of a challenge given the low word count, but it was nice to have to be so precise. Every line had to serve a few purposes at once, giving him enough detail to feel real while also acknowledging his role in the narrative of the album.
Blaze: Musically, this song came together rather quickly compared to the others, and we knew almost immediately that it would be the opening track because it felt especially visual from the start. With this one, we wanted to experiment more with synth sounds, arpeggiators and 808s while still maintaining a dark, twangy, human feel. I wrote and demoed the synth part for this song a few months before we began working on it. When it came time to re-track everything, I could never get the same emotion and character out of the part, so we ended up keeping the demoed performance.

MYTHIC LOVE
Reid: This is where the two central characters of the record meet for the first time. The image of the woman glowing red in the brake lights surrounded by tree limbs is one I had been fixated on for a few years, and I was really glad that it worked so well as the female lead's introduction. My main focus, lyrically, in this song was to convey a sense of mania. What they are experiencing is so overwhelming they feel the need to explain it to each other, but each attempt to put it into words ends in fragmented images, building all the way to the realm of myth. What they are feeling is too wild to be wrangled into words.
Blaze: Musically, this song started out like a lot of our songs, as a fingerpicking song that Reid wrote on the classical guitar. Being a love song, we wanted to pursue a kind of classic country duet in the spirit of Nancy and Lee. Pretty early on, we knew that our friend Bria Salmena (Frigs, Orville Peck) would be perfect for this. When the song collapses into the Ronettes beat, Bria's voice snaps you into the chorus and initiates the huge feel change. We made demos of her part and emailed the track to her in Toronto. We were floored when we got the recordings back from her.

BIRDS
Reid: The idea with this one was to cram months of the couple's life together into one song. At some point during this time, the female lead buys a camera which sparks her love for the medium. Photography is a big part of the record. Nan Goldin's work - especially 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' - was very influential to me while writing the lyrics. It was a way for me to feel a bit of the feral energy of the city while in lockdown. I wanted this character to do the same thing for the world of the record, using her photos as windows into the lives of the couple and the people around them in the turbulent city.
Blaze: Musically, this song came together in a pretty unique way for us. We were on the computer editing one song that we weren't happy with. William started cutting up little segments and stripping things away until we had a 10-second drum and noise moment we were really inspired by. That clip gave birth to an entirely new song where we started building from the drums and percussion up. William's bassline over the drumbeat created a strong backbone for us to layer loops, vocals, and samples we made.

POINT AND SHOOT
Reid: The story of this song is told entirely through the female lead's photographs, with each stanza being a new snapshot. We get a glimpse into how the central characters' lives are progressing. How her art is progressing. How their relationship with various substances is progressing. The narrator looks at the photos and describes them: Naked women lined up on a roof, a now-dead friend laughing with a broken jaw, a bored face in a coke mirror selfie, etc. In one of these, he notices that something about the look in his partner's eye seems different.
Blaze: We wanted this song to have that smokey, noir feel for Reid to string a torrent of images on top of. Once the shuffle rhythm and atmosphere were set, Blaze added the main synth melody to feel kind of like a water-level in a videogame. The horns in the chorus sections are actually cut up trombone stabs that William manually laid out, taken from a piece of music Jason Disu played on a song we ended up scrapping. We also had our friend Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers, Modern Nature) come over and record wild sax freakouts in our basement.