Adelaide’s Bad//Dreems release their fourth single today, taken from their forthcoming LP ‘HOO HA!’ scheduled for release by Farmer & The Owl / BMG Records on May 19th.
Led by an unforgettable Canned Heat-esque flute hook and a nod to ‘Hee-Haw’ by The Birthday Party, Bad//Dreems set out to capture the frustration, malaise, and confusion of the post-pandemic world in ‘New Breeze’.
Stream the single here, or watch the new video here.
“We looked forward to a utopia at the end of the pandemic, but life is never that simple. You end up just pissing in a different breeze,” says Alex Cameron (guitar) in relation to the song’s creation.
In a similar vein to the spontaneous pub prose of previous single ‘See You Tomorrow’ (most playlisted song for the band in Australia to date), frontman Ben Marwe leads the listener in a vaudevillian romp, bringing novel ways to continue our inexorable decline in banal turpitude.
The song is chock-full of the band’s characteristically wry observational lyrics, in which high and low culture, Australian slang and historical and contemporary references combine in catharsis.
Who do you think you are?
Another Roman on Holiday
Days aren’t spent they’re use frittered away
A way to get your kicks
Gallipoli to Galilee
On a quest for victory
Untamed in the back waters
Ecstacy! Ecstacy!
Times may have passed for the everyman protagonist at the centre of many of HOO-HA!’s songs, but old frustrations remain – just pissing in a New Breeze.
Visuals of these motifs are apparent in the charming low-budget video clip, as Marwe plays dress ups in the form of a local football yob, a sinister speed-dealer-chainsaw-thrusting wrongdoer, a holy man, and a dishevelled looter that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of Two Hands. Footage of political leaders, shamed servicemen and religious figureheads accompany the ‘wackadoo’ collection of Marwe’s alter-egos, pieced together nicely by long-time filmic collaborator of the band, Tom Stevens.
Once disrobed of the absurdism, the irony and the Titanicist flute arrangement, ‘New Breeze’ contains powerful lyrical messaging that is representative of a warped modern-day milieu, where anything seems plausible, nothing seems doable, and everything deserves to be pissed on.
Pre-order the new album ‘HOO HA!’ from https://bad-dreems.lnk.to/hoohaalbumPR
