This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Album Reviews
Album Review: Surf City – Kudos (Fire Records)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 18 October 2010
Ask anyone to name New Zealand’s contribution to music and, if you’re lucky, they might cite Crowded House and one-hit wonders OMC.
To those with more knowledge of independent music history, though, the Flying Nun label, formed in 1981, would surely get a name check, it being regarded by many as one of the more pivotal labels of the eighties. Emerging from the dying days of the punk era, the Flying Nun bands kept the ethos of the independent spirit and merged it with Velvet Underground-style minimalism and lo-fi experimentalism.
Keeping the character of the label alive in the twenty-first century are fellow Kiwis Surf City, a young quartet from Auckland. Although they pay tribute to their country’s independent musical past, they equally keep on eye on the trends of British independent music of the same era. ‘Kudos’ displays several reference points to bands such as Spaceman 3 and The Jesus And Mary Chain, from whom they derive their name (from the b-side ‘Kill Surf City’, itself a reworking of ‘Surf City’ by Brian Wilson). Accordingly, the main ingredient to Surf City’s sound is feedback and plenty of it, and like the bands they admire, it’s the combination of writing conventional ‘pop’ songs and drenching them in feedback, whilst burying the vocals deep into the mix, that works so well.
The Surf City template is short, sharp bursts of songs around the three minute mark, though that’s not to say they don’t depart from their tried, tested and successful method on the near-eight minute ‘Icy Lakes’ and ‘Yakuza Park’, which utilises frequent use of synthesisers to complement the buzz of guitars and shows the clear influence of contemporary critical darlings Animal Collective. Closing track ‘Zombies’, the title of which may be a nod to the influential 1960s band of the same name, demonstrates the band’s interest in psychedelia and reconnects their 1980s influences with those bands that in turn influenced them.
‘Kudos’ is a record that has much to recommend about it. It never feels overly derivative or reverential, using influences merely as a springboard for developing the band’s own interests, whilst remaining punchy, compelling and full of energy. KW
Buy from iTunes
Buy from Amazon
