JOPLIN, Mo. —
Single of the week
Kid Cudi, Bethany Consentino, Rostam Batmanglij: “All Summer”
As blog fodder foisted on the Internet by a corporation to increase brand visibility goes, “All Summer” is pretty good.
Kid Cudi is the perpetually high rapper best known for his stoner anthem “Day ’N’ Night,” Rostam Batmanglij is a producer and member of the blockbuster indie band Vampire Weekend and Bethany Consentino is the songwriter behind new buzz-band Best Coast (see below). The three artists got together to bang out “All Summer” for some Converse-related promotion.
Batmanglij produced a breezy, peppy pop song that burns nicely and expires in 3:30. Consentino handles the chorus Ñ “All year long we wait for sun / at the beach we come undone” Ñ and Cudi’s laconic, every-dude flow gives the verses a washed-out quality.
For a song explicitly about summer and released in July, it hits its mark. I don’t know if I’ll be listening to this two months from now, but that’s not really the point.
“All Summer” is the equivalent of a popcorn flick you see to pass a particularly hot summer afternoon. You can download the track for free at Converse’s Web site.
Best Coast: “Crazy for You”
Rating: B
Best Coast is at the front line of a resurgence of beach music. Playing pop music with waves of reverb, Consentino’s sun-soaked voice recalls ’60s girl pop in a way that many new bands have, but the songwriting is strong enough that the music evolves beyond its references.
After all, what do the Shangri-Las or the Crystals mean to the kids in their 20s who’ve been building the buzz that surrounds Best Coast? The majority of the album is Consentino dealing with a break-up and pining for her lost love at odds with the “ohhhs” and the music’s bright disposition.
Nothing on “Crazy for You,” however, eclipses “When I’m With You,” the single that preceded the album.
Beginning slow and meditative, the song quickly builds to a rapid clip where Consentino sings “when I’m with you I have fun,” but by the end she reveals that the fun has perhaps ended as she repeats, over and over, “I hate sleeping alone.”
Wavves: “King of the Beach”
Rating: C
Every generation deserves a slacker pop-punk band to call its own. And for the kids coming of age now that band apparently is Wavves, which is basically a 23-year-old bro named Nathan Brown.
If Consentino is the queen of the return of the beach, then Wavves is the king, and he is a divisive monarch (Both of their album covers feature cartoon cats, FYI.)
For the legions of (mostly) dudes who keep Wavves inexplicably at the forefront of talked-about bands, there’s a vocal minority that regarded Brown as a moron, his fans as meatheads and his fame unearned. But if you focus narrowly on his music, I can’t imagine it inspiring much passion in either direction. It’s more shrug-inducing.
Brown is capable of writing catchy, fuzzy guitar pop Ñ “Post Acid” and the title track are fine examples Ñ but over the course of the album, his music can quickly become irritating the same way sun and sand can if you’re at the beach too long.
Dum Dum Girls: “I Will Be”
Rating: A
Dum Dum Girls work in a similar aesthetic as Wavves and Best Coast Ñ punk as filtered through lo-fi ’60s pop Ñ but they ultimately sound more East Coast and overcast than West Coast and sunny.
“I Will Be” was released back in March to mostly great reviews. But in the sped-up cycle of the Internet that drives the music biz, March might as well be eons ago and “I Will Be” seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
Produced by Richard Gottehrer, who wrote “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “I Want Candy” and produced albums for Blondie and the Go-Gos, “I Will Be’s” girl-group bona fides are accounted for.
But while the music is bubblegum pop, there’s an even, emotionless quality to Kristin Gundard’s (admittedly pretty) singing voice that gives the songs an emotional complexity at odds with the lyrical content. And the repetitive, snare-heavy drumming that drives many of the songs gives the Dum Dum Girls a toughness that many of their contemporaries lack.
That said, the cover of Sonny and Cher’s “Baby Don’t Go” that closes the album is slow, vulnerable and devastatingly good.
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