komplicated

The melding of styles was as widespread as it was seamless and, perhaps, inevitable; as a genre, punk was always as defiantly resistant to clear definition as it was to authority, with bands like Fishbone, The Clash, Fugazi, Bow Wow Wow, and the aforementioned Bad Brains merging rock with dub, calypso, funk, jazz, and any imaginable musical form. Still, the starkness of The Vidablue’s approach—the instrumental arrangements so delicate and tender, with vocals so scrapingly abrasive—suggested a sort of identity crisis, an inability to move too far in one direction.