Bambara

Bambara 

Reid Bateh was thinking about reincarnation. Old lives, new selves, how we carry the past with us long after the people who defined it leave us. This was not a new age awakening, but a matter-of-fact kind of reincarnation: how some version of us dies with a collapsing relationship, how we hear an ex-lover’s voice where it doesn’t belong. He began reading academic studies on reincarnation as more of a scientific possibility. And then a story began to take shape, a saga spanning decades, full of frontier violence and dive bars and electric chairs and manic zealots and women linked across generations by dreams and snakebites.

This would become the narrative arc of Birthmarks, Bambara’s fifth album. In turn, Birthmarks is a sort of reincarnation for the trio — Reid and his twin brother Blaze (drums), alongside childhood friend William Brookshire (bass) — altogether. Five years removed from their last full-length Stray, and three from their 2022 EP Love On My Mind, Birthmarks inevitably arrives with the weight of a new chapter after a lengthy absence. Long ago having established their brand of magnetic darkness — equally formed by the grit of their adopted New York City home and the mysterious corners of the Georgian swamps that raised them — Bambara found themselves in a period of slow, laborious evolution. Birthmarks emerges directly from the band’s favored aesthetics and themes, but captures them with a new sense of sonic adventurousness and thematic subtlety, resulting in a collection of songs that are somehow both the band’s most apocalyptic and most poignant.

With a new European record deal with Bella Union, Bambara also had expanded resources. They tapped Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton as producer. After spending a year writing a glut of new material, they arrived in the seaside English town of Ramsgate in June of 2023, fully confident they had a finished record they just needed to knock out with Sutton. But Ramsgate was just the beginning. The Batehs and Brookshire returned to Brooklyn and set about on a year-plus of breaking down and reimagining the recordings — tearing songs down to their roots, rebuilding them with samples and loops culled from the studio sessions, collaborating with Sutton on new edits from across the Atlantic. The music grew more spectral, more sinuous than the feral rock the band had made their name on. Blaze and Sutton cut and manipulated percussion over and over, indulging a new fixation on rhythm.

“We have to start an album and let it find us,” Blaze says. “See what happens and let the music evolve us, instead of forcing ourselves to evolve in a certain prescribed way.”

From its opening moments, Birthmarks announces itself as a different kind of Bambara album. “Hiss” is an evocative curtain rise, a hotel room tryst while a storm kicks up outside — Reid’s longing recollection met with thrashing drums and warped-beyond-recognition guitars. Right afterwards, “Letters From Sing Sing” is the rare moment of customary Bambara rock ’n’ roll, now augmented by frazzled trumpet blasts and loud metallic clangs. Some tracks are similarly
fresh spins on Bambara’s wheelhouse: Lead single “Pray To Me” went through several reinventions before surging forward on ghostly guitars and buzzing synths rather than the band’s erstwhile clamor. Elsewhere, the trio explores foreign territory. “Face Of Love” is as hypnotic and disorienting as the recollection in its story, Reid sing-speaking over a twilit track inspired by DJ Shadow and Cocteau Twins. Blaze cites other brooding, atmospheric acts like Massive Attack and Portishead as influences on the more textured, restrained iteration of Bambara’s sound.

“I think we achieved our goal of avoiding our usual maximalist approach,” Brookshire ventures. “There are less explosions, and Graham helped us realize we were just creating assault for the sake of it.”

As the trio patiently figured out Birthmarks’ sound, so too did Reid find himself in a longer, wandering phase with lyrics than on prior releases. Reeling from the breakup of a long-term relationship and an uncharacteristic bout of writer’s block, he delved into an intensive
five-month writing period. The writer’s block lifted when he went personal, purging the questions and demons lingering from his relationship. “Because You Asked” derives from an actual conversation he had with an ex some ten years ago, and sits on the record as a sort of bottle episode — outside the narrative, but crucial to understanding it. From that song, Reid discovered the themes he wanted to explore. “I wanted to write about the idea of love surviving after death, or the lingering desire to remain connected with someone after a relationship ends,” he says.

Yet Bambara’s music is rarely literal or confessional, and from the jumping off point of “Because You Asked” a wild, multi-faceted story came to life. The same as Bambara crafted the music by turning songs over in different lights, Reid built a circuitous tale of shifting narration and camera angles. Reid populated Birthmarks with composite characters, built from stories and people across his life; even something as seemingly outlandish as a one-eyed Evangelical murderer takes details from the Batehs’ childhood. “I never want it to feel like some fantasy,” Reid says. “The songs have a basis in reality. I write about things I feel I have enough experience with.”

True to its name, Birthmarks became an album of inherited scars, echoes, sins passed down. Over the course of the album, Bambara become increasingly cinematic, delivering a twisted story of depraved men and angelic women over music veering from dreamlike to nightmarish. Allusive and chronologically scrambled — each member cites Mulholland Drive’s structure as a major influence — Birthmarks concludes with revelations in “Loretta” that force you to reevaluate what you thought you heard, to travel back through the album for new clues.

Yet none of this would work if Bambara didn’t walk a fine line. Birthmarks draws you in, and you can decide how far you want to tumble down its various rabbitholes. Despite a long, complex gestation, the album stands as Bambara’s most immediately striking music, and
paradoxically as some of their most human writing. Rendered with mythological Americana, Birthmarks has a simple invitation at its core: to join Bambara in the shadows, parsing what we do with the memories and faces that haunt us no matter how far we run.

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