Kids on a Crime Spree
We Love You So Bad

Summer.

Anticipated, three months longed for at school desks where the countdown would begin on the last day, two short weeks hoped for at office desks. Seductive, warm, full of hope. Summer when you're a student is a huge parenthesis, a lethal mix of a desire for escape and the awareness that when you return everything will be there waiting for you. At least until damned cellphones gave you the ability and, especially, the necessity of always, constantly knowing where the people you care about are, what they are doing, why they are not responding.

I remember summers until I was 18, mid-June would arrive and I would leap from that desk to go somewhere no one could reach me, even if it was just my room, but it was my summer room. However, I knew for sure that in September I would return and find everyone there in their place. Not now, now if someone doesn't reach out for a week I always wonder why, did something happen, did I say something wrong? Damn technology.

But summer is always the same, the most suspended season of all, the need not to think that makes its way, the desire to disconnect that grows stronger, until you start working and realize how short summer is, when you have to align your two weeks of vacation with those who have other needs; I have always had a school conception of years, for me, a year doesn't end at New Year's Eve, it’s easier for me to sum up what I've lived when summer takes its first steps, there's a much clearer, defined sense of breaking, you can come back and change, even if it never happens.

Not on New Year's Eve, it's just another night like many others that if you didn't have the itch of having to do something at all costs you would probably spend like many other nights playing FIFA online on the Xbox. Summer feels the need for certain melodies, short and simple, like those of Kids On A Crime Spree, melodies that when you hear them you think all the '60s were lived in summer. They don't come from the '60s, this record is from today, freshly baked in 2011, but the quest for sound ends up stranded in that decade, with the Beach Boys singing melodies in tune with the reigning atmosphere when our (at least, my) parents weren't even dating yet.

"I Don't Want To Call You Baby, Baby", "Trumpets Of Death", Mario Hernandez's echo-filled voice, reeks of old speakers, Bill Evans and Becky Barron filling the tracks with retro sounds. That’s all, and it's all enjoyable. No track exceeds 3:30, the record slips by pleasantly, a pleasure that lingers. You remember it, I remember that glimpse of sea where you smile. Like on "Sweet Tooth", sweet. Or like on "It's In My Blood", dirty and nostalgic. "Impasto" is the best thing on the record, those moments towards evening when it's hot but you don't sweat, when you feel your skin wrinkle after the first sunny days.

The summer sun is strong, it follows you, watches over you, and tires you out, I couldn't tolerate it for more than the three months I allow it, but all in all I appreciate it, it opens an interval that I always end up classifying, because all summers in the end are taken as reference points. And after "Jean-Paul Sartre 2" closes, you don't even realize that summer is over.