Spirit Club
Slouch

2016 Albums: Missing Part.

There are Wavves who started off making extremely lo-fi pop-punk before moving to a more mature pop-punk and that's it: something to listen to while drinking warm Dahlberg from ugly bottles at the ramps behind the public beach, where the kids go with their skateboards. There's Jeans Wilder, who creates psychedelic low-fidelity indie: something to listen to while smoking, lying under a palm tree in the small parks where the vu-cumprà go to lie down during the hottest hours of the day. Then there are the Spirit Club, which consists of Nathan Williams from Wavves, his brother, and Jeans Wilder from Jeans Wilder. A project that surprisingly works, and doesn't sound like either a supergroup mess or a poor imitation of the original bands. And thank heavens that on the internet the cool-ness of listening to Nathan Williams is no longer present, disappeared along with the use of the word hip-ster. The album can go unnoticed without my poor red eyes having to read phrases like "pretentious" and "derivative" and "Spirit Club sounds like three chumps who, upon growing up, realized they listened to too many Beach Boys and decided to put their acquired knowledge into practice." Which is actually very true.

There is Slouch, it's the second album by Spirit Club and I liked it a lot. There are the ooh-ooo-ohhhh choruses we love so much and the little keyboards that go plink-plink. There are the classic Wavves melodies (Fast Ice, That's My Curse) and the expanded Jeans Wilder psychedelia (Metal Dream, Room to Run). There is the growing alienation as the album progresses, with the trippy keyboards of Broken Link and Lately I've Been Sleeping, with the accumulating almost embarrassing beach-boyness choruses of Needful Things, with the ubiquitous falsettos of Your Eyes Tell Lies and That's My Curse that strongly evoke 1960s sunshine-pop with flowers on the cover, with the little guitar in Nearly as Good as You that seems like the work of an indie rocker transplanted to 1950s Hawaii. In closing, deceptively, there is the semi-sad piano-rock of I'm in Heaven and even the extremely melancholic track You're So Mean.

There are people like Tame Impala and MGMT who more and more resemble a broken promise and instead there are the Spirit Club who, for now, manage to convince and not falter. There's me, writing as I watch the plane trees emerge from the November fog and think it's already been six years since I dreamed of one day being the king of the beach and that it's now time to draw conclusions. Nathan Williams managed it, at least he did.