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Bond Villain Strikes Back For The Summer

Lucy Gellman | May 30th, 2019

Bond Villain Strikes Back For The Summer

Music  |  Arts & Culture

 

Album-Art---Small (2)
Bond Villain Photo. Cover art designed by Stephen Roche. 

The first thing you hear is a clap of thunder, or maybe it’s a bomb dropping. Then synth, cutting the music like a knife, ready for the percussion that lands on top of it. A crowd bellows in the background, and suddenly this is an epic landscape. We hope it’s a benevolent one; we fear it’s not. The music soars over it all, dizzying as it wraps everything around it in suspense.

The aptly named “Villainous” opens Deadman, a new four-track EP that dropped Thursday morning from New Haven based musician Robert Roche, better known under the moniker Bond Villain. The EP marks a new direction for Bond Villain’s work, which has been underscored with experiment, collaboration and sensational, boisterous, sometimes clubby orchestration.

Produced with Jean-Christophe Santalis of Raw Recording with cover art from Roche’s brother Stephen and New Haven's Lotta Studio, it is now widely available online.

“I’m so excited to get these songs out,” Roche said in an interview on Memorial Day. “It’s a unique, new take on what I’ve been doing.”

In the EP’s four tracks, Bond Villain travels from a penchant for the dramatic to a background soaked in punk and rock, to a keyboard-flecked meditation on loss. Along the way, huge drums roll out, guitar and fuzz drench everything in their midst, and listeners get a sense of Roche’s own love for the synthy, crackly, reverb-soaked and sharp. There are hints of The Killers and Beck (if Beck was on Adderall), of A-Ha’s own work for the James Bond movies in the late 1980s, and heavy nods to Nine Inch Nails and Muse.

Which all makes sense—the project is named after the movie villains that have been part of the James Bond franchise for decades. The pieces are deeply orchestral in the same way that movies and video games can be, with intrigue and suspense that leave room for quirk and camp. Their newness comes from a sweeping, grand musical landscape—you can tell Bond Villain is challenging itself and want to stick around to hear the result.

“They're meant to provoke very specific emotions in you,” Roche said.

It’s not a long trip—no more than 11 minutes, from start to finish—but it’s a fairly intense one. One moment, listeners feel like they’re stuck inside a video game, fumbling around for the lever that will lead back to the outside world. Another, and Roche has let his guard down completely in the elegiac “Stumble,” allowing a fair amount of vulnerability to sneak onto the track. Another, and there’s an urge to run faster, jump higher, and pump more iron with the electricity of “Dead Man.”

There’s a certain propulsive through line that carries the EP all the way through. After a climactic opening with “Villainous”—it really does feel like a bad guy is about to emerge from the woodwork—listeners tumble into “Dead Man,” an electric soundscape unraveling in front of them. The song nails the euphoria, constant movement, loud edges and likely moshing of Roche’s own hardcore years in Boston, a sound that he said he’s wanted to get back to since his early twenties.

“I really wanted to push myself a bit and see what I could do with my voice and composing style,” he wrote in an email after the interview. “I love the lyrics—they play a lot in that surreal, campy horror space. It’s like a high-school fight song for vampires.”

But Bond Villain also slows things down with “Stumble,” percussion pulled back to showcase keys and vocals for the first portion of the song. The song is instantly relatable: the musician laments forgetting the details of a person’s face, then of their voice. Dedicated to friend, city culinary luminary and fellow moped rider Bonnie Keller, who died earlier this year, he said the song is a reminder that “through loss, you need to find a way to become better.”

“We all have this ability to release all of our inner expectations,” he said. “We all have darkness. There are places where you can stumble. But when you see falling down or stumbling as an inevitability, it’s like, ‘okay.’ You learn to get up ... you find that salvation in yourself.”

Deadman is at its best, perhaps, when Bond Villain is doing the thing its name most suggests: gnashing its teeth and being a little unruly. Raised between Singapore, the Philippines, England and Philadelphia, Roche said he pulls from an eclectic music background when he’s composing. He recalled listening to “very strange music” with his mom as a kid, and realizing that musical conventions—like the classic rock his dad listened to—were meant to be broken.

So he breaks them, all the way through the final track of the EP. “Die For You” sweeps in with a beginning reminiscent of the theme for The Incredibles, and endearingly so. Vocals rise, distorted then crystal clear as they keep climbing. There’s the sound of glass shattering somewhere, and an electric spray of notes.

“It is a tale of an apocalyptic love story in a world that is broken and spinning out of control,” he said. “This song is a story of becoming empowered in the worst of times to fight for important things like love.”

To listen, click on the Spotify embed below.