Bitchin Bajas : Inland See
It seems like just yesterday that Bitchin Bajas put out a new record, and that instinct isn’t that far off: In May, the prolific trio consisting of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye and Daniel Quinlivan gifted us with a meditative collaborative work they made with Natural Information Society, called Totality. As it turns out, both magical bands had much more music hidden up their respective sleeves, with the former revealing Inland See just a few months later, and Natural Information Society due to deliver a new album of their own this month.
Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas have been in the zone pretty much from the jump, letting nearly a year go by without sidling up alongside us, giving us a warm hug and drinking coffee with us to breezily catch up on how life is going. They do so wordlessly, instead relying on electronic synthesizers, flute and saxophone to communicate through a dreamy ambiance that makes making music sound awfully easy.
Deviating from traditional indie rock, Bitchin Bajas recorded Inland See at Chicago’s Electrical Audio (rest in peace, Steve Albini) without employing any reverb and thus giving the songs a sleek sound that puts one at ease and provides them with a sense that they’re in safe hands and that there won’t be any jostling or jump scares throughout the listening experience.
The 39-minute record consists of four songs, anchored by “Graut,” an epic closer that comprises roughly half of the album’s length. It begins with an extensive, reverential and pacifying passage that resembles what one might hear before a Unitarian church service gets underway. But about four minutes in, the soundscapes melt away and are replaced by playful, buoyant, lightly staccato music that extends, trance-like, for the duration of the record. It’s perhaps the quintessential Bitchin Bajas composition, and once it arrives, the three tunes that precede it feel like warm-up exercises, or cinema trailers to tide us over until the feature film begins.
This writer’s interpretation of Inland See is that, by using wordplay in its title, the essence of the record is a gentle but assured suggestion to look inside yourself, accept who you are—foibles and all—and arrive at a place of acceptance where the sensation is akin to floating, without moving any of your muscles, above a warm and serene body of water. From there, you re-enter the earthly womb and become reborn: not as an entirely new person, but as the person you are and were always meant to be. Don’t you see?
Label: Drag City
Year: 2025
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