New! Music Monday

Ahh, alliteration. The perfect excuse to start something new. Each Monday, I'm going to post an album review. Sometimes it will be new [as in, released the prior Tuesday], and other times it will be an album that I've been listening to lately. So, without further ado, my installment of New Music Monday [the exclamation point is included in the title because this album is not new, per se]. Enjoy!

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I’ve heard this before. I don’t just mean that I’ve listened to Surfer Blood’s debut album Astro Coast many, many times [I have], but, more to the point, the band’s sound brings to mind recent indie pop powers as well as beach rock from the 1950’s. Each time I listen to Astro Coast, I find something new and simultaneously old in Surfer Blood’s sound: Weezer’s power pop chords and quirky lyrics; Girls’ simple West Coast surf jams; Brian Wilson’s iconic harmonies. Yet Surfer Blood’s sound cannot be solely defined by these bands or their peers. Rather, Surfer Blood’s sound is something fresh, cobbled together from the tones and chords of earlier acts.

Astro Coast hides a handful of dualities under its surface: aggressive yet tranquil, buoyant yet melancholy, faded yet fresh. Guitar riffs wax and wane melodically on “Anchorage.” The melody repeatedly rolls to a crest, pressure growing with each push, until it bursts into a clear and crunching crescendo. Black’s lyrics seem to ride this wave throughout the song. Matching the early drone, Black sings of vast emptiness in his frigid Alaskan wilderness. At the same time that the guitars explode from this overarching dreariness, his mood warms and becomes almost hopeful. “I just want volcanoes to erupt/and thaw me out,” he lets out. Throughout Astro Coast, Black longs for some sort of enlightenment, or simply to erupt from his depths. The mood is kept afloat by the band’s driving beach pop, played tight and fast over guitars soaked in reverb and echo. “Fast Jabroni” and “Slow Jabroni” share a hopeless cry for compassion and contact, but do so in two different tempos [hint: “Fast Jabroni” is, um, faster]. On “Swim,” the band’s reverb-soaked breakout single, and arguably its strongest offering, Black bitterly asks, “On whom can you depend?” over four staccato-stroked power chords. “Swim” is the band at its most fun as well as aggressive, its energy inviting anyone listening to yowl along with Black. The end result of these dualities is an album of intense longing and sadness that plays bright and sunny, ideal for a beach blanket with a beer as well as dark winter night at home alone.

Astro Coast sounds like your High School friends’ garage band, only nuanced and refined. It is the music I wish Weezer would make today. It is catchy and comfortable, something altogether familiar. It is that familiarity that makes the album so fun [and played so often on my iPod, in my car, and so on].