Surfer Blood
1000 Palms

Ah, the relatively unchanging cycle of the seasons! How often, for how many of us, do the seasons and their chromatic-climatic-hormonal implications serve as an irritating and unsuitable backdrop to moods - but also to clinical conditions - stubbornly contrary to the mood and collective imagination.
Meteoropathics and those with broken bones are lucky in this regard. For others, the more passive, all that remains is to blame nature or God, depending on their preference, for this tilted axis of the earth and the revolutions we make around the sun. The active and the optimists - notoriously more awake than average - can instead try to open the eyes of their friends on Facebook because Obama, Samantha Cristoforetti, and the pharmaceutical lobbies with their chemtrails, air shields, and all the necessary spraying, control the climate and the seasons. The reason for this is not entirely clear, though. It may be that everything is aimed at making the climate correspond to the moods of the head of the world's Freemasonry or to an annual emotional forecast of the members of the Bilderberg Group, and so on.
And meanwhile, we poor workers are always there to suffer the moods of the powerful. We have to deal with anxiety in short sleeves. Panic attacks bare-chested in boxers. Depression while sipping excellent mojitos. Hypochondria on the beach fearing melanoma with Coppertone. With heartache in flip-flops.
Then the joy of living returns, and who feels like going out in this crappy weather.

Astrocoast basked in a fortuitous conjunction between mood and season, which for Surfer Blood evidently translates into inspiration and songs like Swim, which will probably never return. Also, because it's one of those tracks that it's a lot if you write one in your life, I don't know if you remember. Tarot Classics was the miniature version: equally beautiful, with Miranda and especially I'm Not Ready.

Surfer Blood were, and remain, a coastal imaginary made of jangle guitars, sunny arpeggios and tremolo picking, beach chants and melodies snatched from the Beach Boys. Rhythms between bossa and reggaeton, percussion and xylophones. John Paul Pitts’ big dog voice that comes echoed as if from a seashell and always chooses the right notes, doesn't skimp on falsettos, and fits well with his overgrown Billabong kid face. Hard rock riffs mediated by Weezer. Perfect choruses.

But on the imaginaries, on the ideal seasons, life and accidents strike: the domestic violence charge against Pitts, Fekete's sarcoma; the band welcomed and dropped by Warner within a year; an album, Pythons, unfortunately beyond its real demerits. Fans and bands from the scene that turn their backs, poor live performances.

1000 Palms continues to pay for what Pythons had paid, and Surfer Blood, more than ever, sound doomed to a perpetual summer. Not everyone is Brian Wilson and manages to get out of it, inventing something big like Pet Sounds. But much less would suffice. For not everyone, the painful beach is a transient condition, like that of Neil Young.
Thus the tail of Covered Wagons is surf while it creates terrible anxiety. Dorian has choruses and harmonizations, major, Caribbean acoustic, but it entangles and remains unresolved. Grand Inquisitor is a horror surf on the toms: waves, rocks, and sharks, but it runs out without going anywhere. The solo of Island has lever and reverb okay, but the chorus is forced into an already weak verse. Feast Famine comes out well, but after Miranda there was no need for it. Point of No Return adds a new interesting beach perspective, more piano-oriented with an ethereal keyboard, poised, but Pitts’ lack of inspiration flattens everything, and in the latest Raveonettes, there are four or five better tracks. They didn't even believe in Into Catacombs themselves. Sabre-Tooth and Bone resolves the progression in a ghostly and unassuring way, as much as forced. NW Passage closes the album dark and acoustic, with a post-sunset melancholy, but without leaving any memory.

Just like anxiety in short sleeves, heartache in flip-flops, and everything, Surfer Blood preserve the superficial aspects of summer and sound intimately unresolved, restless, needing to close themselves in convoluted structures while it's nice outside. Incapable of writing songs verse-chorus-verse-chorus-instrumental-chorus-end.
But we must continue to love them, despite everything, and wish them to regain the mood suitable for their season.