Bimbo: The Bimbonacci Sequence never lands where you expect

Bimbo make records that flinch away from the obvious move. The Bimbonacci Sequence is the Marquette duo's first full length, eight tracks in just under twenty-six minutes, and it spends nearly all of them switching. Gretchen McKenzie plays guitar and sings, Dawson McKenzie plays drums, and a settled groove is something to be escaped.

Bimbo are a sibling duo from Marquette, and the album follows EPs that already mapped this ground: psych-tinged noise, avant-pop shapes, songs built to jump the rails. The credits list guitar, vocals and drums and nothing else, which is where the record's economy comes from. There is no low end holding the floor, so the bottom is guitar fuzz and the rhythm is whatever Dawson decides to do with his hands.

The Bimbonacci Sequence is out on Exploding In Sound, pressed as a 45 RPM LP. Two sides, four songs each, and a runtime short enough that nothing is allowed to repeat itself into comfort. The EP impulses get a full record to work in.

The palette is distortion and space. Guitars come in crooked and gnarled, drums stop and start underneath them, and the production leaves air around the noise so you can hear how much emptiness the pair are working with. They move from dusky, removed art-rock into crunching post-grunge inside a bar or two, which is either the whole appeal or the whole problem depending on the song.

Things Keep Getting Worse opens it exactly as titled: a two-minute build where Gretchen stutteringly rasps a lyric that gets more bilious as the tension rises. The playing is all weight and empty space, and then the song walks off, dissolving into an extended buzz instead of a climax. A strange first impression, and a deliberate one. The song never hands you a chorus.

Sick Moves corrects for that. It runs on a dance-punk pulse, Gretchen chanting and spitting between jerky riffs that owe something to Melvins, and Dawson's kit work is nimble enough to read as gymnastic rather than heavy. Midway through she lets out a howl that is sharp and slightly unhinged, and the song earns it.

Battery Dead is where the album gets its hands dirty. The siblings sink into grunge murk while Gretchen tells a story about emotional and physical collapse, her voice starting assertive and ending as an exhausted rasp. Jackals is the spikiest thing here: sharp, ringing guitar lines, drums that jump and pop, tempo and style shifting between jazzy chords and thudding experiment. It is their art-prog side given full rein, and it holds her most intense singing on the record.

If you come to this for riffs, you will find them, though rarely where you left them. The record sits next to the harder end of nineties noise rock and the stranger end of modern art-pop, and it is for the listener who wants that guitar tone inside structures that refuse to settle. Chewing Glass, Forgive The Plow, I'm Evil Now and the closing Bimbo, USA fill out the sequence around those four.

What does not work is the disappearing act. Things Keep Getting Worse spends its two minutes building and then refuses to cash in, and the same instinct costs the back half: the album can feel like a set of swerves rather than songs with consequences. The buzz is the point, but the album keeps putting the landing off.

Still, there is more here than posture. A debut by two people with one guitar and one kit, built around a question about how little stability a day holds, is a real thing, and Bimbo play it like they mean it. The Bimbonacci Sequence is a 3.5: good, and occasionally better than that. Play it for the swerves, and give the next one a year to land.

The tracklist

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