Surfer Blood – Astrocoast (Canine Records)
Two electric guitars. Or three? It is something I wonder throughout Surfer Blood’s debut LP, Astrocoast. Opener ‘Floating Vibes’ is a fine introduction: Electric guitar following the vocal melody, a guitar climax. This is garage rock, and at times it is grand.
Astrocoast is also an album of melodies. This is wonderfully surprising amidst the barrage of power chords and reverb. ‘Slow Jabroni,’ amidst the muddy thuds of its bass, hands out melodies like they are inexhaustible. Halfway through the behemoth – just barely beginning a consistent rhythm section – singer JP howls out another; and then another. As Courtney said of Kurt, He chews bubble gum in his soul.
‘I won’t wait around / For the glass to blow back now.’ ‘My lover’s a carnivore.’ These declarations, sung in JP’s falsetto, lend the album a haunting it seems it couldn’t contain; but does. This works to the band’s advantage, though the plodding ‘Anchorage’ does just what it’s opening line resists: ‘I don’t wanna spin my wheels.’ But ‘I don’t got no wheels to spin?’ Hardly.
Spinning fastest is ‘Neihbour Riffs,’ where the hooky bassline runs itself in circles beneath the wash of distorted electric chords and guitar noodles, precise but, as they say out West, wonky. The poppy power chord riff of ‘Twin Peaks’ builds itself up the guitar neck repeatedly, until JP is shouting, ‘Why is everything a chore? / I’m too young to be defeated.’ Astrocoast is laughing all over the place; and with a shout-out to yours truly’s hometown: ‘Twin Peaks and David Lynch / On your couch in Syracuse.’ Glad the Salt City could oblige, if only for a video.
The band’s song’s shifts and changes are constant, given the morass of progressions and rhythms the band builds these songs from. ‘Fast Jabroni’ allows the verse to follow the song’s introduction in intensity, instead of dropping out the guitars like a less conscientious group might. The verse stays up with distortion, keyboard and cymbal crashes, not sacrificing momentum. It is sophisticated, thoughtful.
At times (and they sneak up on us) this album is majestic. I lose sight of it sometimes just imagining the noise bouncing off of the garage walls, but it is here. Big. Great?
Originally published at www.quietcolor.com