You start the album and immediately it hits you. First a cascading series of drums, and then a kaleidoscopic soundscape that can truly only be experienced by closing your eyes. Then the guitars kick in, and you realize you are about to go on a truly spectacular auditory adventure.
Released in late June, Welcome to Bobby’s Motel is the second album by Montreal indie punk outfit Pottery, following their 2019 debut album No. 1.
Welcome to Bobby’s Motel sees the band diving further into the funk and psychedelia that underlined the sound of their first record, while still staying true to their punk roots.
Clocking in at a brisk 38 minutes, one can very much find a little of everything but the kitchen sink in this album, with psychedelic breakdowns following funk bass-lines following face-melting guitar riffs.
While it may seem complex, the result is simple, you cannot possibly be able to sit down while listening to this album. Whether that is banging your head during “Under the Wires”, shaking your rump during “Bobby’s Forecast”, or just truly completely losing your mind during the second half of “Texas Drums Pt. I & II”, a song interestingly written to express the love of a drum set.
Even mellow tracks like, “Reflection” carry a magical transcendence around them like a late-night campfire with friends underneath a canopy of stars.
And generally, what I found in this cohesive album is a lot of love. While I can’t say I know too much about this band, I get an unmistakable feeling that they truly enjoy their craft and being around each other.
Much of this album was conceptualized and created over the time the 5 band-members of Pottery (Austin Boylan, Peter Baylis, Paul Jacobs, Jacob Shepansky, Tom Gould) spent touring, as guitarist Jacob Shepansky told Apple Music, “It just ended up culminating into a pretty good portrait of our lives at the time… The whole idea came out of just trying to make the best out of these dismal situations and just enjoy the time with your friends.”
Shepanksy went into further detail saying, “We were staying in all these shitty motels with five guys in a room…we had a day off, so we had this idea to rent a cabin in the woods… and it turns out the guy hasn’t been there in, like, three months and the road isn’t even plowed. So it’s 8pm, we don’t know what we are going to do. All we’ve got is a bunch of undercooked hot dogs and hot dog buns… We ended up going to a Motel 6 and cramming into there, and we had no way to cook these hot dogs. So we just ended up hanging out by the highway behind this barbed-wire fence all night, and it was very special.”
This album is a composition of all of these interesting moments and memories. It is a relentless, action-packed, and damn fun ride that you will not want to miss.
Jaxon Silva is a .WAV staff member , he wrote the article. Image credit to Pottery.
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