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Track List
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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.
Nowhere is this more true than on their breakout single "Swim", which spent the second half of last year generating so much praise that it threatened to make any future album unnecessary or future hype redundant. But even after so many listens, its snowblind-ish reverb is still disorienting-- especially contrasted with its crisp, power-chord hook. It may sound like they're hitting you with their best shot, but after an impassioned "oh oh oh!" from singer John Paul Pitts, Surfer Blood explodes into an even bigger chorus and "Swim" becomes almost overpoweringly fist-pumping.
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.
So is the guise of 'consistency,' meaning the album works pretty well as a strong bunch of songs, hooks, 'riffs' (I was once told never to use the word 'riff' in a review, but sometimes you can’t help it), but it actually works far better as a cumulative and decidedly inconsistent whole. If anyone else noticed that the album version of “Swim” lost the single’s parenthetical “(To Reach the End),” the change makes more sense than you know: it’d be a mistake to blow through this one on Lala. It comes off as spottier but more vital, as increasingly less playlist fodder with each spin.