“Bone Dry” – Blood
Chunky. guitar-driven, and intriguing, “Bone Dry”–song length, 1:44–ends before you can get your arms around its off-center rhythms and elusive declarations. Despite–or perhaps because of–the song’s evanescent idiosyncrasies, the thing is thoroughly appealing, to my ears.
As a composition at once short and knotty, “Bone Dry” may be similar in length to a certain amount of current pop, but is dissimilar in vibe and resolve. Short songs have become more common in the TikTok era, in which exposure to music often comes in sub-1:00 fragments; many pop hits of the current day clock in not only under three minutes but under 2:30, and some even under 2:00. The first thing jettisoned in these pithy songs is any sense of a bridge; another short-song strategy is to offer just one verse and then a short, repeated chorus. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, if artistic considerations drive the decisions. I suspect, however, that the shortening of songs is, mostly, happening via a death-circle feedback loop of streaming stats generated by our collective, information-overload-driven short attention spans.
But I digress. “Bone Dry” is in any case an example of a creatively satisfying short song: rather than present itself as a beat-forward, bridge-less, chorus-heavy earworm-wannabe, here’s a song that revels in its craggy folds and discrepancies. One consistent feature is a relentless avoidance of the first beat of a measure: neither the recurring guitar lick nor any of the lyrical lines start on the downbeat, which is traditionally the strongest beat of the measure and the foundation of a song’s rhythm and melody. That’s out the window here, which is what creates an ongoing sense of things being off-kilter, to the point where the time signature, while (I think) mostly a standard 4/4, feels ambiguous. Another way “Bone Dry” achieves its shortness without oversimplification is its elimination of anything resembling a coda; the ending is sudden, all but in mid-sentence.
Blood is a four-piece band based in Philadelphia that used to be a six-piece band based in Austin. “Bone Dry” is the latest of a handful of singles the group has released since 2019. You can check them all out on Bandcamp.
Fingertips 