12th August 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
While we swelter in the middle of the hottest, driest summer on record, during which wild fires and hosepipe bands sweep the nation, people are shitting themselves about paying for heating in the winter as the cost of living crisis bites ever deeper. When a tub of butter costs £7 and people are staying home because they can’t afford to put fuel in their vehicles, it’s clear that things are beyond fucked and that this isn’t simply some post-Covid dip. This is aa cataclysmic collapse, exacerbated by shit government and capitalist greed. You see, not everyone is struggling here. The top guys, the ones who make all the money from the work of their employees, their doing ok. The major shareholders in the companies raking in profit by the million, by the billion, they’re doing ok. Bankers are landing double-figure pay-rises while the people who keep the country going – from the teaches and nurses to rail staff and refuse collectors – are queuing at food banks at the end of their working day. This crisis, then, is a crisis of social division, a crisis of capitalism.
Formed in 2018, Bedroom Tax sound nothing like Benefits, but both bands are clearly part of a growing swell of stylistically disparate but politically similar bands who exist to voice dissatisfaction, and their very name reminds us of just how hard the Conservative government has pushed an agenda to fuck over the poor.
‘Kin’ is a hybrid amalgam of indie, alt UK rap, and blues influences and they’re probably the post-millennial answer to The Streets – only they’re better than that.
‘Kin’ delves into kitchen sink territory, and blends social commentary and disaffection – not so much bile but a whole lot of downtrodden day-to-day depictions, with the jittery drumming and scratchy guitars of the twitchy verses leading into a magnificently melodic chorus that’s buoyed along by some jangling guitar work. It’s genuinely beautiful, and so well-delivered you can forgive the rhyming of ‘issues’ and ‘tissues’ in the blink of an eye.
AA
Aural Aggravation 
Bedroom Tax – Bad Behaviour
Posted: 30 July 2023 in Singles and EPsTags: Bad Behaviour, Bedroom Tax, Indie, Political, Post-Punk, rap, Single Review, social commentary, The Smiths, The Streets
28th July 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Funny how time goes. Precisely two weeks short of a year ago today, I reviewed Bedroom Tax’s debut single ‘Kin’, against a backdrop of a heatwave and wild fires in the UK, and increasing level of panic over fuel costs ahead of the winter in prospect. And we thought things looked bleak then. No heatwave in the UK this year: instead, we’ve spent the last three months swinging between regular summer weather and days that more closely resemble October while the rest of the world burns, and we long for the days when it was only the cost of energy and Lurpak that were heading into the stratosphere.
Bedroom Tax are one of many bands with sociopolitical leanings who have adopted names which set their stance out in the simplest of terms. I’m thinking BDRMM, Bedsit, Benefits, bands born in many ways out of frustration and necessity, and their very existence is a statement about the crushing economic climate we live in – at least if you’re a regular person and not in the executive echelon, or otherwise comfortably off thanks to inherited wealth, a backhander from a mate in government, or an MP.
The so-called ‘bedroom tax’, introduced in 2012 is one of many examples of the tory government shafting the poor and the disabled, and as Michael Rosen pointed out in an article for The Guardian in 2014, the bereaved, was found in 2019 to be discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights. No wonder the government are keen to ditch the ECHR: they keep ruling that their inhumane policies are illegal.
Since releasing ‘Kin’, Bedroom Tax have spent their time reflecting and refining their sound. It’s been time well spent.
‘Bad Behaviour’ is a magnificent melding of post-punk and post-rock with ‘urban’ elements, and possesses both beauty and bleakness simultaneously. Chiming guitars and programmed beats provide the backdrop to the incisive yet flowing rap of the lyrics, poetically dissecting social division and the hand we’re dealt due to privilege or lack of. It’s got bounce and groove, and even a certain noodly indie jangle that’s seen the sound of The Smiths cast through a more current prism that’s still more 2006 than 2023, but there’s a joy in witnessing the bounds of genre time being dismantled, and knowing that Morrissey would fucking hate it.
It’s a progression from the kitchen-sink reflections of ‘Kin’, but at the same time, there’s still that gritty realism, with echoes of The Streets, and the reason Bedroom Tax are so appealing is because there’s no pretence, no artifice: they’re telling it like it is.
And just as punk and post-punk emerged from the desolation of Thatcher’s Britain, so the current wave of acts who hark back to that but with the addition of more contemporary twists are coming from parallel circumstances. Austerity may not be the buzzword of the present, but we never left it: cuts upon cuts by cunts upon cunts are why we are where we are. And acts like Bedroom Tax articulate the everyday realities of life right now. We need these guys.