Medina, Ohio's Total Babes recorded Swimming Through Sunlight in a garage. It's a fitting place of origin considering their debut, 30 minutes of hook-y punk songs, hits a number of garage-rock beats: Their aesthetic offers Wavves-colored juvenility, their sound an in-the-red fuzz with a subtle pop sensibility and vocals delivered with a bratty abandon. Despite the shimmering album title, dinosaur-and-ice cream cover art, and bratty delivery, though, Swimming's a darker album than you might expect.
Most of the 30 minutes consist of fast, jovial-sounding power chords, yes, but beneath the fuzz is a series of songs that builds a narrative about deteriorating love. It begins innocently enough with a series of drum crashes and a tossed-off line,"My thoughts just turn to you/ Just like they always do." Soon enough, things get heavier, from the semi-desperate promises of "Be So True" to the post-breakup of "Someone to Blame". It culminates in "Without Your Heart", a track that uses the vocals, tone, and hook of a 1950s teardrops ballad. It's the most clear-eyed and clean sounding song on the record.
The group is commonly cited as a Cloud Nothings side project, and while there are connections between the two Cleveland-area garage bands, that's not exactly the case. Cloud Nothings is primarily the project of Dylan Baldi, so although Jayson Gerycz has played drums on one or two singles, this is his first time recording as a multi-instrumentalist, let alone as a songwriter. Some of that inexperience shows. Taken separately, the songs are driving punk gems; as a whole, they rarely offer a change of pace. The material is repetitive (down to the same general vocal patterns), each song bleeding into the next. The lyrics of each track push the story forward, but even that becomes difficult to parse past the samey delivery. Only the 50s vibe of "Without Your Heart" and the jangling, echoing closer "Tip of My Tongue" offer a rest.
That said, the semi-aggressive tone can serve as an ear-catching counterbalance to the emotional outpouring: "Don't Have to Run" leads with a vicious, rolling drum crash while asking, "How will I go on without you?"; "Rot Away" features a more upbeat hook than the title suggests, though Brown does yell, "I'll rot away inside your gaze," in the chorus. Catharsis is good, but slathering a variety of emotions with such consistently muffled vocals and guitar distortion cheapens their point. By the halfway mark, Swimming Through Sunlight starts sounding less like a garage-rock band and more like some kid howling about frustrated heartbreak in his parent's garage.
