Touch Girl Apple Blossom gets its name from a syntactically odd line in Beat Happening’s signature song, “Indian Summer.” When the Austin quartet announced their debut album, Graceful, and signed to K Records—the Olympia label founded by Beat Happening’s own Calvin Johnson and largely responsible for bridging the gap between the punk and pop leanings of Northwest DIY in the Eighties and Nineties—it felt like the prophecy of their name had been fulfilled. A match made in Heaven, really, for a band that has described the crowd’s energy at their shows as “push pit fun” and “not moshing, not not moshing,” and a record label whose signees have operated under an artistic philosophy of “pop with punk ethics” and whose founders “widen[ed] the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in a motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.”
Much like their peers in indie rock’s current twee revival, Touch Girl Apple Blossom balance sweetness and edge, nestling their more bitter or sorrowful lyrics in cutesy, homespun arrangements and overlapping power pop harmonies. Having seen their tourmates, Good Flying Birds, play to a moshpit that rivaled the rowdiness of ones I’ve seen at venue-destroying hardcore shows, I’m not surprised that Touch Girl Apple Blossom have inspired similarly raucous crowds. Even in Graceful’s mellower moments, the songs have a spring in their two-step, a pop jauntiness that only punks can muster—even if a bit reluctantly.
A song like “Heart-Go” comes alive in its yelps, drumrolls, and kinetic riffs. “Where does the heart go when the heart’s not in it?” Olivia Garner asks at the chorus. The following “Dustin’s Song” flickers between daydreams, regular dreams, and real life (the latter of which, of course, pales in comparison to its counterparts) along wafer-thin cymbal taps and a tangled web of guitar distortion. Drummer Daniel Charles Powell’s light touch lends these songs a nimbleness and buoyancy; rather than grounding these songs, Touch Girl Apple Blossom’s rhythm section (rounded out by bassist Dustin Pilkington) makes them feel weightless. The feathery production only adds to the dreamlike, faded-at-the-edges effect.
Beyond just their referential band name, Touch Girl Apple Blossom aren’t shy about showing their influences in their songs (which are often so cute and chipper it almost feels more appropriate to call them “tunes” or even “ditties”). It’s easy to hear their K Records twee pop forebears like Heavenly, Tiger Trap, The Softies, and All Girl Summer Fun Band in the pillowy guitars and sighs of “so in love” on “You Made Me Do It” and in the folksy slow dance of “I’m Lucky I Found You,” where Graceful reaches peak realtime nostalgia. “Sunglasses off and blinding / I was looking for you,” John Morales sings, his slacker romanticism reminiscent of Doug Martsch at his most puppy-lovestruck. Other times, Graceful’s rickety jangle, analog hissing, and bright, guitar-forward mix feels straight out of Nineties Athens, when all the Elephant 6 bands were in a race to see who could make the best Beach Boys song on the most ramshackle budget.
“We always do this / Let’s not fight about music,” Garner sings on “Vacation.” If you didn’t already know that Graceful was a record by and for folks who tie their hearts a little too tightly to the records they love, this should clue you in. The title of closer “Big Star Shinin’” pays homage to arguably the most notable architects of power pop, and what better way to close out an album-length twee daydream than with a “la la la” refrain and a whirring Chilton-and-Bell guitar solo that spends the record’s final few minutes floating off into the ether. A homespun tenderness stitches together the material and emotional moving pieces of this record, each and every note “in sync with a beating heart.” [K Records]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
