Surf City - Jekyll Island

  by Carl Bookstein

published: 14 / 3 / 2015

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Heralding from New Zealand, Surf City has recorded ‘Jekyll Island’, the band’s third album for Fire Records, with hallmark sun drenched fuzz and psychedelic echoes. ‘Beat The Summer Heat’ starts out with taste-of-India flavoured sonic reverb, then a hypnotic drum beat, then the singer/guitarist Davin Stoddard evoking a mystical summertime. His words, including the title repeated, are soaked in fuzz, yet the sound is engaging. ‘Spec City’ states “It was later than we ever dreamed.” The psych rock meets shoegaze sound buzzes. The effect is enchanting. The title track ‘Jekyll Island (and the Psycosphere)’ washes over the listener with a psychedelic sound of summer buzz- with steady drums and quavering guitar. ‘Hollow Veins’ is at once musically blissful and lyrically unsettling: “You got nothing running through those hollow veins.” An entrancing and trip like ‘What They Need’ somehow brings to mind ‘Heroin’- era Velvet Underground. ‘Leave Your Worries’ rings with good vibrations. The lyric “Just remember to leave your worries at home” repeats. ‘Indian Summer’ creates a musical flow and speaks to the power of the sunset. On ‘Thumbs Up’, the listener hears a single - a happy, up-tempo, buoyant, sun-drenched tune with a great beat, captivating in its spell. ‘The End’ emanates with shoegaze reverberations and flowing hallucinatory psychedelics -“The end is easy if you’ve got a way out.” The closer ‘Jesus Elvis Coca Cola’ creates a powerful cascading flow- like much of this album, capturing hypnotic sounds of summer.

Track Listing:-

1 Beat the Summer Heat
2 Spec City
3 Jekyll Island (And the Psycosphere)
4 Hollow Veins
5 One Too Many Things
6 What They Need
7 Leave Your Worries
8 Indian Summer
9 Thumbs Up
10 The End
11 Jesus Elvis Coca Cola

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/killsurfcity

Label Links:-

https://twitter.com/firerecordings
https://www.facebook.com/Firerecords
http://www.firerecords.com/
https://firerecords.bandcamp.com/
https://instagram.com/fire_records/
https://www.youtube.com/user/FirerecordsUK

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