Summer Camp
Young EP

Santinumi, it's cliché, but time flies, especially when relatively little has passed, even if in a few days it will be about eight years since I saw perhaps on MTV Brand New the video of You! Me! Dancing! by Los Campesinos! and decided I really liked it. Back then, text messages were all the rage, and I had the habit of watching music videos and commenting on them via text with a friend who watched the same channel. I remember almost nothing pleased me, and almost everything pleased her. But that song, friends, won me over even before a Reptilia, which was also the jingle of Brand New: but above all, does Brand New still exist? It was lovely.

It's not really worth being nostalgic, and it seems a bit early anyway, but this year - with just four years late - I somehow stumbled upon the debut EP of Summer Camp and felt like I did back then, as if that world had reopened to me. The Summer Camp doesn't resemble Los Campesinos! much, in fact, they were more guitar-based while these are much more synth, but the spirit is the same, or maybe I just like to think so. Anyway, six songs, twenty minutes and plenty of small joys from this husband-wife London polistrumentalist duo, very cute, harmonious, and fond of Armenian modern antiques and modern antiques in general, including musical ones: it's clear our guys have listened to a lot of sunny eighties synth-pop, with their strictly synthetic rhythms, improbable great keyboards, minimal guitars, and plastic basses (except for Ghost Train, driven by a dark plucking tone from an old Hoffner type like La Femme d'Argent by AIR, just to give the first example that comes to mind), but it's also clear that Elizabeth Sankey modeled her lovely tone after the institutional sixties female singing, like Alaina Moore of Tennis - but not as talented - who also, coincidentally, has a husband who plays in the band; in the way predictable and despicable fit into the lyrics of Was It Worth It, Morrissey peeks through - but Morrissey peeks through wherever there's a lack of distortion in England - and the song in general with its whiny chorus It makes me feel so down like I'm gonna die remains memorable, guaranteed. The long waves of the opener Round the Moon should be danced to relaxed, and the alternation of male voice-female voice is not at all banal; the vocal line of Why Don't You Stay gives physical pleasure and the little keyboards of Ghost Train are so silly they evoke tenderness.

Don't be fooled by the analog aesthetic of the cover: it's exactly stuff for 2010 hipsters. Nothing essential, but listening to it won't make you a worse person, and once I talked to a guy who recommended a whole series of things he considered indispensable and he practically said it in every sentence. Don't ever become like that.