Inland See by Bitchin Bajas

Feeling all jammed up? Need to cool it down? Wanna stop the world so you can get off? Bitchin Bajas got you – come on and join them on a total trip to their latest, Inland See.

The successor to 2022’s Bajascillators glides easily into frame, but once there, Inland See is deceptively immediate. Like, the first side rides past with a wild suddenness! It’s not that it isn’t there; rather, it’s so dialed in, you hardly even feel how there it is. Time warping’s always been a resident magic for Bitchin Bajas, as is flow, which is translucent like water here. That plus the tesseract-like action of being in the songs and then behind the songs or is it past them? It’s the Inland See vibe, unique unto itself. In turn, each of the four songs here are entire within themselves, together forming the essential whole. The coincision’ll cause yer breath to shorten, like an exciting and non-fatal kind of exercise! New freedoms, yet more molecular structure in each one. And it feels so easy...

This is the thing. With every successive Bitchin Bajas release, we get it, anew and again, that the real key for them is a sense of discovery, that tingle that comes when you feel something breaking through. Something new. The sky opening up. If that’s not happening in the new Bitchin Bajas music, then you’re not hearing it. The stuff that is here, that fills this Inland See, holds you up powerfully, as if you’re floating, saltwater or helium-wise – effervescent, effortless, elemental.

All the while, Bitchin Bajas are growing further into themselves, an increasing sense of their physicality – what’s ephemeral, what’s mercurial, and what sits inside us after it’s all over. Who knows how or why, but one thing that WAS a little different was how this music was mostly written on the road. It’s an unusual happening for Bitchin Bajas. They were open for it, though – Bajascillators kept them out there for a while, and when inspiration struck, there they were. Also a little different – when it was time to render it to tape and find the record there, they did the whole thing at Electrical Audio. Recording all together in the room there lent a sense of space, which they dug and captured as natural as possible. No reverb at all added after the fact. Everything that’s there was in system, directed through the interconnects with cool hands. And once Inland See is flowing toward you, through the hi-fi, you feel it all in the air.

That’s what the music’s for!

Cooper Crain
Rob Frye
Daniel Quinlivan