I’m Being Good are back with their somethingth album, and what a number something is. Difficult to describe IBG without reference to a bunch of ’90s bands, but for my money they’ve always had a wit and laconic element that’s missing from your Polvos and Truman’s Waters.
Plenty of this is composed quite closely — two chord vamps frequently cede to complex guitar-on-guitar chords that have a fairly IBG-specific harmonic language. “Appropriately Infinite Universe” is like a series of dirty piercings, a slog of slowly eking through a threat and then wee explosions of unison, slack-tune timbre strings wailing. Where early IBG would sit in those noisier bits for longer — the fun of the thrash — the IBG of this album are perhaps more interested in the threat than the exposition. Which makes the rackety bits all the more fun.
Probably one of the more fun things about IBG, for my money is that they’ve been more about the clean tones the last few albums. One of the perennial problems of distortion is that it flattens out dissonant intervals, filling the sound with the harmonic spectrum. The trick, as seen here, is leaving those frail dissonances bare, arguably making them a lot more effective. It also exposes the writing from a harmonic perspective — which is presumably why this is a later IBG album rather than an early one, such is the variety of takes on the malevolent throb.
Worth saying really that there aren’t many bands who’ve ploughed such a unique furrow as IBG — I don’t really keep up with guitar music, but it’s probably because I don’t see many bands giving the instrument and arrangements this sort of care and attention. It’s somewhat trite to say that a band are overlooked; but if there’s one band that probably should be getting their old guard plaudits, it’s I’m Being Good.
-Kev Nickells-
