Surf City - New Zealand’s Furious Strum and Gun
Surf City takes their name from a Jesus and Mary Chain Single, and not some dreamy addiction to Jan & Dean and The Beach Boys all drowning in the orgiastic California Sixties Surf. Surf City’s self-titled debut EP is a can’t miss proposition. Five songs of frantic guitar and hurried rhythms melding the hyper pop of fellow countrymen The 3D’s with the timeless melodicism of The Clean. This is to say this band is not merely skulking in the shadows of its forefathers but rather Surf City functions as a peer to the very best of New Zealand’s rock and roll exports. “Headin’ Inside” is an adrenalin OD, a pop rock rush and perfected 2:28 second blast of righteous wind. The second offering here, “Dickshakers Union” is a more dynamic affair with instruments coming and going amidst excitable shouts and chants.
If blogs are the new record store (in terms of turning people onto new music) - this is definitely one of those bands that will be exposed by many writers on the web as a significant find. It’s impossible to ever forget the exhilaration any listener feels when hearing a band as legitimately astounding as Surf City for the very first time. Think Pavement, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and The Verlaines - and more importantly, get this EP now.
Perhaps the best part of working in a record store was listening to music all day, talking music all day, and sometimes turning people onto bands worth their time and money. England’s Pete & The Pirates is definitely one of those bands I would have been enormously excited to share with anyone crossing the threshold of my workplace. Vocalist Tommy Sanders’ voice and guitarists David Thorpe and Peter Hefferan may nod to Bends-Era Radiohead, but the tunes also harken back to the melancholic genius of New Zealand’s Verlaines. Pete & The Pirates’ debut album Little Death is out now and available. I could write paragraph after paragraph extolling the virtues of this band’s art, and yet all one really needs to do is listen.
Pete & The Pirates - Not A Friend