The Strokes – Eternal Summer
I don’t hate The Strokes. I do respect them. “Last Nite,” “Reptilla,” “Someday,”–all required listening in any well-rounded, liberal indie education.
And you can’t deny their influence. But you can cringe at the large handful of bands that try to ascend to the Iron Strokes Throne. The Strokes’ sound is just too unique in its asymptotic approach to nails on a chalkboard to replicate.
I didn’t give their 2020 release The New Abnormal because the track listing included such self-loathing titles as “The Adults are Talking,” “Why Are Sundays So Depressing” (I, personally, love Sundays) and “Ode To The Mets.” Stop pretending to like baseball.
Nonetheless, “Eternal Summer” made it past my external security and into my weekly rotation. The rocky groove and finicky guitar picks, with right amount of Strokes whine, cements this one for me. Another begrudging exception to my bipolar Strokes fandom.
Immy Owusu – Brown Supremacy
Not to get political, but this song rocks. The surf funk of Immy Owusu feels familiar because of my heavy recent dosage of Vieux Farka Touré (by way of Khruangbin). It stands apart for its Rasta and hip hop garnishes.
Owusu hails from the Australian surf-burb of Torquay, outside of Melbourne. And like Touré he comes from West African music legend stock. His grandfather is Koo Nimo, a renowned Ghanian musician; Owusu traveled to Ghana to study under his Nimo. When he returned to Australia, he fused two sounds that are far apart on the Mercator but close on the beach and under the sun.
Upon closer inspection: notes of Dope Lemon
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs – Crosswalk
TEED is back on the scene with his first full-length since 2012’s Trouble. In true DJ fashion, he’s released a good bit of singles in that 10-year gap.
Check this one out for some its sophisticated take on 2010’s indie-electronica. Stick around for its focused synth rock outro.
Ganzo – Mindgames
I pass myself off as a cultured man of guitars, basses, drum kits, and vocalists who wield instruments. Of musical influences and genres and traditions. Blues, jazz, soul, funk, rock, reggae. Indie-this, indie-that. But at my core is the 16-year-old who would blast house and electronic dance music ripped from youtube or soundcloud and burned onto CDs, blaring a remixed remix at 7:30am on a frigid Maine winter day as I peeled into the junior parking lot.
So it was this inner teen that immediately called out the similarities between Ganzo’s repeating piano riff in “Mindgames” with the eternal Eric Prydz house banger “Pjanoo.” The songs couldn’t be further apart. But the mind works in mysterious ways. Especially when it’s been subject to near-concussive levels of synth and bass at its most important stages of development.
Swimming Tapes – Tides
London by way of Northern Ireland shimmer rockers Swimming Tapes give us the UK’s answer to Real Estate with the bright “Tides.”
<===>…and the rest of ’em... some drum n bass from Netsky… an Avalanches-inspired mixer from Chris Laufman… and the Aussies got more than surf rock, mate.
<===>This is the kind of bike-activism I want stateside. Who can be against shutting down the roads for a bike rave?
<===>I remain baffled that escooters are subject to so much public vitriol. I think we’re deep down disgusted with our car-centric culture but don’t know how to vocalize our opposition to it. So when something new (like escooters) comes on the scene, it’s an easy, cathartic target.
Kevin Shaw nails this with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Sure, we all know somehow who injured themselves on an escooter. But did they ever uproot a tree? There’s levels to this shit, people.
<===>An imperfect map, yes. But at the end of the day there’s no reason we can’t power our country by taking 1/6 of Arizona and making it solar panels.