The Daily Gamecock

New York punks invade Columbia

The Brooklyn-based band, Bluffing, was in Columbia on Monday to rock a show at Conundrum Music Hall in West Columbia.

The band combines the urban chic of New York-style punk with a laid-back air: a frontwoman in a black-and-white, polka-dotted dress and a drummer wearing pajama pants who sings as well.

The duo of Jonathan Boxer and Olivia Drusin lead the four-piece group, alternating vocals song by song. Insisting that they “won’t waste yr time,” Bluffing takes a pop-punk format and distills it to the max: almost all of their songs are between one and two minutes long.

“The record we just made this past spring, all the songs ended up being really short and it felt right,” Boxer said. “We listen to a lot of pop music and a lot of punk music, and both of those genres are characteristically short.” Their debut, 10-track album, Sugar Coated Pills of Wisdom, clocks in at just over 16 minutes.

Another distinction of Bluffing’s sound are Drusin and Boxer’s reliance on soft, often falsetto vocals that, rather than perch atop the music, sound along with it.

“It’s just because we’re singing and we can’t really sing that loudly,” Drusin said. “When we first started playing as a duo Jon wrote a lot of his songs in an alternate tuning. I didn’t want to have to alter between a low, open tuning and standard [tuning] so I told him we’re just gonna do standard and that’s why he sings really high on most of the songs.”

The band explained that the short songs are not necessarily a style of songwriting, but more of a condensing process.

“I think it’s just an editing thing,” Drusin said. “It’s not necessarily a super different approach, it’s just deciding what’s making the song sound the way you want and less about fillers.” Although, the length might give them an advantage in an age where attention spans are decreasing. “The idea is that it’s short so you want to hear it a bunch of times.”

The band deferentially claimed that the style is just a product of their influences.

“A lot of the bands that we’re drawing influence from for this project write only short songs,” Drusin said. “I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily something we’re absolutely trying to do all the time, but that’s definitely where we started.”

Bluffing exhibits a symbiosis with fellow New York band, Big Neck Police, a group formed by Boxer and Drusin’s high school classmates. They are sharing a van on their tour down and back up the east coast.

“They’re one of my favorite bands ever right now,” Drusin said. “It’s really cool to go on tour with them. We just came from Athens, went as far south as Florida, and head as far north as Boston before heading back down into Brooklyn.”

The tour included a Fourth of July show last week that got wild with a falling chandelier and maelstrom of fireworks while the band kept playing. After the first song in the set at Conundrum, Drusin affably requested a place for the band to stay for the night, and was stoked when floor space was promptly offered by one of the attendees. They are savoring the uncertain environment that young bands inhabit.

“Yeah, it’s been fun,” Boxer concluded with a grin.


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