I love songs that sit on the cusp, or in the case of this latest one from Rowhome, many cusps. I get it if you like your music to sit in neat boxes, follow the template, appeal to your comfort zones and expectations, but that’s not for me. The world should be more fun and surprising than that, dontcha think? Surely the whole point of leaving the tribal and heavily genre-demarcated past behind is that artists are free to mix and match and merge and meld, and mingle, sonically speaking. “Bad Feeling” is the sound of that process letting fly.
That quirky, shonky synthy sound that opens things up might be playfully alternative and outsider pop, but the groove that nails everything down is pure indie. And that drum-driven guitar rhythm seems like the solid through line upon which everything else is hung, other six-string motifs chop and change, dynamics rise and fall, beats ebb and flow, and that sweet and fragile indie-pop voice works wonders.
It feels like a new wave of pop that nods slightly to all those weird and wonderful (and I mean that in the most positive of ways) bands who were too odd to get a foothold in the mainstream. But odd is good, right? Odd swerves fad and fashion, odd ignores the zeitgeist, odd is adventurous, singular, unique! Odd is your friend, one that no one else gets…for now! Odd is the only way forward, and “Bad Feeling” is leading that charge!
