The Bundles’ eponymous debut album may have only taken a few days’ studio time to record but, in reality, it was over eight years in the making. Beginning with a get-together between Kimya Dawson and Jeffrey Lewis in 2001, The Bundles became a full band a year later with the inclusion of Anders Griffen on drums and Jeff’s brother Jack on bass. However, due to the growing success of their individual projects, it took until 2009 for the quartet (along with troubadour Karl Blau) to record an album.
The Bundles sees those original Dawson and Lewis’ demos tidied up and given depth with extra instrumentation and some rather nice choral singing at appropriate junctures. There are a few new tunes too, which were written on the spot by all five artists in the studio. A mix of sweet, slow acoustic ditties and lo-fi garage, the album’s ten songs often have a Moldy Peaches-style structure to the vocals, with Lewis and Dawson alternating or singing different lines on top of each other at the same time. This sense of ordered confusion layers the songs, as different snippets of each lyrical thread take prominence randomly.
While possibly only for existing fans of the anti-folk genre, this DIY, raw and ramshackle album has warmth and charm without the slightest hint of pretension and is another example of the honesty of the individual members of The Bundles. As Dawson herself puts it on Over The Moon, “Everything that I am doing isn’t the means to an end/It’s the means of creating a meaningful existence/And I just wanna sing with my friends.”
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