If you've kept your ear to the ground for the last year and a half of pop music, a band named Surf City isn't likely to rouse much of a blip on your Richter Scale. With reverbed vocals, slippery bass and loads of glossy guitars, they play shoegazey pop with a casual immediacy. But Surf City aren't near as self-absorbed or stoic as their peers, and the result is a debut LP, Kudos, far more dynamic and with fewer hang-ups than you'd expect.
Surf City hail from New Zealand, but the geographic separation from their North American peers doesn't tell the whole story. Unlike the pretentious slack that limits chillwave or fuzzy beach-pop bands, Surf City are informed and excitable. They take a step back and examine shoegaze more thoroughly, paying homage to the genre's more seminal forefathers like The Jesus and Mary Chain. Kudos is expansive and involved, yet what makes it so rewarding is a pervasive sense of fun.
Shoegaze demigods My Bloody Valentine are notorious for debilitating perfectionism. Early on, it's clear Surf City don't suffer from the same problem. They're really only shoegaze by default—for a genre literally defined by its members' penchant for standing still, Surf City are awful lively. ""Here Comes the Sun"" and ""Kudos"" could have been ripped from a high school Guided by Voices demo, and it's hard to envision anyone playing ""CIA"" without running in circles.
This spry enthusiasm is unusual for such droning sonics, but it's ultimately what keeps Kudos so interesting. They know when to meditate on a loop in ""Yakuza Park,"" and they know when to quit dicking around and systematically obliterate shit on ""Autumn.""
Kudos covers a lot of ground at once, and it's impressive how organized Surf City keep everything. Their cleaner pop-punk inclinations are clearly defined from their more visceral indulgences; but instead of working to counteract the effectiveness of each other, the polarity works as a balance—Kudos is never too wayward to be taken seriously, and never too serious to be a drag.
But while Kudos covers more ground than most contemporary works, its productivity serves as a catch-22. The work they're doing gets complicated, and it's no wonder some of the songs sound underdeveloped. They seem lost navigating some of the darker corners of ""Yakuza Park,"" and their songs often sound rushed.
Surf City probably have an attention span about as short as mine. Accordingly, ""Teacher"" and ""Retro"" sound like SparkNotes versions of more ethereal noise or drone bands. We get the climactic rush of everything falling into place without the arduous detective work. Kudos is a grab bag of shoegaze's most interesting sister subjects, and an album as adventurous as it is accomplished. It's everything the last year and a half of noise pop could have been. And while expecting too much growth from such a freewheeling outfit would be counterproductive, it's still fair to think Surf City is what the next few years in pop should continue to be.
