Astro Coast

Surfer Blood are JP Pitts, Tyler Schwarz, Thomas Fekete and Brian Black, four men in their early twenties from Palm Beach, Florida. No surfers themselves, despite their band's name, the music that they produce does nonetheless seem, on some level, informed by the ocean besides which they grew up.

There's plenty to like about Astro Coast, the debut LP from the youthful Floridians in Surfer Blood, but first and foremost it's a great guitar album. So what exactly does that mean these days? Often, it's a reference to either a display of astounding technical chops or innovative use of tone and texture, qualities which, to be quite honest, aren't particularly present here. This is a great guitar album in the way Weezer's Blue Album, Built to Spill's Keep It Like a Secret, or, more recently, Japandroids' Post-Nothing are: six-strings serve as a multiplier for hooks, making it every bit as easy and fun to air guitar with as it is to sing along to.

Think of Astro Coast as a good litmus test for whether critics and cursory listeners (and the many in between) are feeling prescriptive or descriptive; some of us want to change things, some of us just want to observe. Because, come on: gymnasium reverb sloshed over squiggly West-African-by-induction guitar lines, those three-note James Mercer hooks that would sound inane on a piano but world-rocking when chief songwriter John Paul Pitts belts 'em out. In other words, Surfer Blood's debut album is a sonic distillation of the buzzing naughts; we’ve heard it before. This stuff feeds both sides. Surfer Blood carry themselves like they’re making a statement about production — “Harmonix” builds its tension and release almost exclusively out of a washy guitar alternating with that’s-right harmonics — but they really aren’t. Sound, for Pitts, is just a conduit to something much less universal.