The indie-rock retention rate has been sinking drastically in recent years. If the scene was beholden to No Child Left Behind statistics, the government would have taken over a long time ago. But the only way to hold the attention of our increasingly ADD crowd has been to keep feeding it fresh material. We don't retain or learn much, but at least we're equipped for those best-of-the-year finals in December. It's a neverending cram session in which one devours plenty but savors little.
Against this backdrop, a band's success is more likely to be of the flash-in-the-pan variety than perhaps ever before. This is maybe a good thing since, as of late, we've been frying up a lot of crap and calling it gourmet. If there's a mega-hyped band whose omnipresence irks you, fret not: The fairweather affections of our crowd will bury them soon enough. On to the next.
But in the process, the nuances of the few bands who are actually worthy of the hype get glossed over, and given that we generally view a band to be only as good as their last album, revisiting their previous successes is viewed as "so 2004" — or whenever it was they were last on the final exam. The only thing cooler than liking a hip band before most people have heard them is hating a hip band afterward. Right now, liking Surfer Blood is very cool, and it's going to be sad when that changes, because this time the hype machines mostly got everything right.
The Surfer Blood saga started late last year with a single called "Swim (To Reach the End)," an anxious amalgamation of guitar-centric indie and surf rock whose popularity with bloggers led the Florida band to play 12 sets over the course of five days at last year's CMJ festival in New York. Just three short months later the band's full-length debut Astro Coast dropped and garnered lavish praise from all the familiar king/queen-makers, bringing the Surfer Blood hype to a boil.
The band's immediate appeal is easy to recognize. They're basically giving us back all the stuff we learned was great before we started overextending ourselves — stuff from the days when records hung around long enough so that one day they might be called classics. Astro Coast probably won't find itself described as a classic, but the broad spectral range the band explores and re-contextualizes should give it some staying power that's largely been absent in indie rock. In the Astro Coast world, Kevin Shields lives next door to Brian Wilson, who's rooming with The Ventures in a town where Pixies compose the city council. Putting all that together without sounding gimmicky is a feat unto itself. Rising to the occasion and delivering an album as good as the promise shown on "Swim" should have been damn near impossible.
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