Surfer Blood – Snowdonia
You shouldn’t judge a record by its cover or indeed by the context surrounding its creation, but you might be forgiven for jumping to certain conclusions about the latest album from Surfer Blood.
The cover art depicts an iceberg hued in a suitably frosty filter that brings the blues, whites and greys to the fore, and this is, as most familiar with the band will likely know, their first album since the passing of guitarist Thomas Fekete, who died of cancer last year. It wouldn’t be a stretch to expect icy, detached introspection in the circumstances, but as it turns out, Snowdonia feels very much like business as usual from the Floridians.
This fourth LP is the first since their debut to be entirely produced by frontman and chief songwriter John Paul Pitts, and there’s plenty of nods back to 2010’s Astro Coast, an album you suspected the group were trying to tap back into the energy of last time out, on third album 1000 Palms. That leaves Pythons as the outlier in the catalogue, an anxious, gloomy album that dealt with the fallout from Pitts having been accused of domestic abuse and channeled the scrappy energy of Astro Coast in another manner entirely.
That’s precisely what it feels like Surfer Blood have lost since Pythons; energy, whether nervous or exuberant. The moments on Snowdonia that hark back most directly to their first full-length are the ones that go most obviously through the motions – the one-track chug of Frozen In The Armory is a case in point, as is the breezy but lightweight Instant Doppelgangers.
Instead, it’s left to the rare moments of an experimental bent to salvage proceedings. The surf rock guitars of Six Flags in F or G sound like The Strokes gone rockabilly, and the album’s centrepiece is the title track, a pretty pop confessional that glides glacially to a near-eight minute running time. It’s at points like that one that you realise that there’s plenty left in Surfer Blood’s tank – they might just need a clean break from their earliest material in order to capitalise on it.