(2020) Gum Country - Somewhere


Review:
While making catchy indie pop tunes with the Courtneys, the group’s guitarist Courtney Garvin was also teaming with multi-instrumentalist Connor Mayer to write and record music that’s a punchy mixture of C86-style indie pop, prime-era shoegaze, and good old-fashioned indie rock. They started off working at home on a four-track recorder, but for their first album moved to a real studio and called in Joo-Joo Ashworth of Froth to help them get the sounds they wanted. Actually, Somewhere is packed with the kind of sounds that will knock out anyone with even a vague interest in any of the aforementioned styles. The duo capture the hooky melodies and sugar-sweet vocals of classic indie pop and the layered dreaminess and hypnotic rhythms of shoegaze, then add thick slabs of guitar and the shrugging wistfulness of the best indie rock. Tracks like the rollicking “Tennis,” which sounds like Butterglory after taking the Charles Atlas course, or “Talking to My Plants,” which comes across like Cluster and the Clean doing some gardening together, show just how well integrated the duo’s influences are on the album. Not only have they done their homework and put their lessons to good use; they also play the heck out of their chosen instruments. Garvin’s guitar work is perfect throughout, whether she’s jangling like a member of Look Blue Go Purple, churning away in gloriously muddy fashion, or giving lessons on how to raise a six-string ruckus on extended blown-out jams like “Pills.” She lays down snaky psychedelic lines on the title track, pushes her amp to the breaking point on “The Queen Rules,” and gets a truly gnarly tone on “It Lives, It Breeds, It Feeds.” Mayer is there to back her each step along the way, providing rock-solid drums and sneaky-good synth parts that apply just the right amount of color. It’s a classic approach, tried and true, and used by many bands. Not too many of them have done it with the same combination of innocence and violence, power and grace, lightness and heaviness. The band describe their sound as “harsh twee,” and that’s pretty close. Nobody else is likely to call them that without cringing a little, but no one should feel shy about calling the band damn good indie rock because Somewhere certainly fits that description. It’s a near-perfect encapsulation of all the best things about the styles they’ve ingested, played, and sung with just the right amount of gleeful grit and charming enthusiasm. If you’ve fallen out of love with indie rock – or even if your devotion never so much as flickered – Somewhere just might be enough to remind you why you loved the sound in the first place.





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop, indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits