It’s the opening night of BODEGA’s UK tour: Manchester is warm, and the Pink Room is bursting with sweaty revellers, each vying for a position under the air conditioning. Ben Hozie and co stride on stage fashionably late: “Let’s start this shit off right”, Hozie announces before leading the band into a thunderous cover of ‘Paranoid’, by Sabbath in tribute to the late, great, Ozzy Osbourne.
They continue at pace, never breaking pace from the original thrashed opening. At no point does the energy drop as BODEGA rattle through tune after tune. BODEGA bring a slice of New York cool to the Pink Room, with varied looks and musical influences ranging from American DIY punk, via the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, via Talking Heads. Their musicality is unmatched in its variety too, bouncing around slices of hardcore, post-punk, pop and much more.
It’s clear that BODEGA are doing this on their own terms: they are waltzing through a set teeming with career highlights, and the work from last year’s excellent Our Brand Could Be Your Life is the cream of the crop. BODEGA have an excellent knack for working brilliant anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist messaging into their tunes: they make time to speak out about the genocide in Palestine (there is a keffiyeh draped over an amp stack at the back of the stage), and to decry Spotify for their inherently anti-art methods.
They’ve grown into everything you want from a post-punk band: they bend the musical rules of their own genre, their politics are admirably right on, they work with incredible ease together, and the more time you spend in the company of BODEGA, the more you realise how completely underrated they are.
