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- Summary: The fourth album for the Seattle-based rock group was produced by Mike McHugh.
- Record Label: In The Red
- Genre(s): Indie, Rock, Pop
- More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 5
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Mixed: 0 out of 5
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Negative: 0 out of 5
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They’re all about mucking around with monstrously catchy, juvenile surf riffs and then suffocating those infant laughs with a tight plastic bag of reverb; warm, gleeful guitar tones are stripped to their menacing essentials and left to bake in rancid West Coast heat.
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His deadpan honk of a singing voice calls to mind a less caustic Mark E. Smith, and he arranges the 12 quick songs with a gift for effective repetitive hooks and reductive structures.
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Fake Surfers doesn't continue these new adventures in hi-fi. Rather, it plays to the Intelligence's extremes, casting a more pronounced British Invasion pop influence in warped, peak-level lo-fi sonics, emphasizing a connection between post-punk and psychedelia that stretches from Clinic and Guided by Voices through the deconstructionist pop of Swell Maps and Wire and back to the whimsical wordsmithery of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence.
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Gone is all the nervous tension that crisscrossed most of Finberg’s twitchy, dystopian vignettes, replaced instead with carefully plotted fuzz and a general hazy ambience that suggests calculated late-1960s ennui more than anything else. Overall, that’s a really good thing, especially when accompanied with the band’s seemingly newfound ability to ply their songs with unexpected twists and subtle new details.
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While Fake Surfers might not have the immediate impact of Finberg's earlier albums, but it takes his music in some bold directions without losing its smart-alecky, catchy-despite-itself essence.
Score distribution:
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Mixed: 0 out of
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Negative: 0 out of