Bored Décor’s full debut, The Colour Red, is incredibly successful on many fronts. It’s focused, and presents a soundscape that’s clearly informed by its predecessors, particularly bands like Magazine and Gang of Four. However, where Gang of Four’s seminal “Damaged Goods” famously twists a dance-floor structure into a grating, self-criticizing anthem driven forward by a decidedly funky bass line, Bored Décor consistently see and exploit the potential in making each track on The Colour Red explicitly danceable.
What do we mean? Two-thirds of the way through “Spasms,” a track that reels back and forth on a choppy, infectious rhythm, the breakdown, which starts with a bluesy, fuzz-saturated riff, builds up into a peak that would have any concert hall on its feet, only to cut off abruptly as the track ends. The result is cheeky, self-aware, and almost cynical on the part of the band; it’s as if they’re telling us, you could dance to this, but we’re not going to let you, at least not for very long.
“Hardworking Man” is a perfect example of this. Nik Barkman’s theatrical, melodramatic delivery swings back and forth over a sharp, four-note riff. It might take listeners some time to catch the groove, given the lyricism is spiked with an attitude that punctuates the fragmented guitar riff. Effectively, Bored Décor really leans into blues while balancing it out with enough off-kilter rhythms and counter-melodies to push it into a space where, while what we’re listening to is rock at its core, its main descriptor is more about how it sounds rather than what it sounds like: It sounds (and is) fun.
More impressively, The Colour Red manages to do something that many other records fail to do. Entrenched in the tradition of post-punk and influenced always with a bluesy base, Bored Décor never once, in their debut’s 11-track run, become lost. Not once is their identity stylistically in question.
The slow closer “Black Bananas” almost veers off into a style that might be read as disingenuous, but one minute in, we’re pulled back in by the core aspects that tie Bored Décor’s material together: vocals delivered with a detached confidence, an interplay of rhythm that jumps from the kit to the bass to the guitars at any moment, and a playfulness that’s hard to pin down. At any moment, most tracks on The Colour Red come off as serious, and they are. They are also, however, imbued with a tongue-in-cheek appeal that’s infectious from the first. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “No Love in Romance,” the record’s flagship track.
Saturated with a tension that would otherwise overwhelm listeners, the two-and-a-half-minute-long romp blasts off and maintains its unforgivingly fun tempo for the entire run, pushed on by the bass, rhythm guitar, and kit all at once. It’s addicting in the sense that it ends too early, but would run on too long were you to jog its pace around your block. Barkman’s delivery ties the track together with a warbling that betrays either the anxiety endemic to the rest of the record, or a giddy excitement that I can only image is always mirrored by every crowd that has already and has yet to swing hips and hair with the kind of self-aware hedonism that’s on full display on The Colour Red.
