Even though they grew up 6,000-plus miles away from Brian Wilson’s gold coast, Auckland indie-rockers Surf City exuded enough beach-bound exuberance on their 2008 self-titled EP to justify their sand-swept moniker. But in the wake of 2010’s decidedly more plugged-in and spaced-out Kudos, their name has taken on decidedly different connotations. With a growing affinity for discordant frequencies and motorik rhythms chasing that imperfect sound forever, these guys make music for people whose idea of surfing involves a channel clicker; the only tans anyone’s getting here are from cathode rays. But, damn, is the sofa ever comfy, and on Surf City’s second full-length, this sort of spirited slothfulness codifies into a modernity-shunning mission statement.
Surf City songs tend to be differentiated only by which strain of Velvet Underground-inspired rock they choose to mainline on any particular day, be it the Krautrock pulse of Neu!, the stoner drone of Spacemen 3, or their formative, flagrant Flying Nunnery. On We Knew It Was Not Going to Be Like This, they tilt toward verbose Pavementian slop-pop, though Davin Stoddard is much more pointed in his fight-this-generation polemics than Stephen Malkmus’ notoriously oblique observations-- we’re no less than 40 seconds into the album before Stoddard’s spitting, “fuck the kids who don’t know what’s around.” It’s the first strike in Surf City’s war on totally wired, fractured and distracted 21st-century living, one that eventually sees Stoddard proudly proclaim, “I don’t change!” But Surf City aren’t just going back to those gold sounds, they’re updating them for their own ends. In his finest Thurstonian drawl, Stoddard builds the chorus of “NYC” upon a line from Sonic Youth’s classic “Cotton Crown”-- “New York City is for every kitty”-- before adding this telling rejoinder: “But I don’t think I’m one of those kitties.”
Ironically, these statements of non-conformism are backed up by Surf City’s most streamlined batch of songs to date. On Kudos there was a real sense of the band taking their familiar influences and simultaneously distending and corroding them in search of a new noise. We Knew It Was rarely evinces the same boldness, proffering instead a steady procession of jangle-fuzz jingles that yield moments of brain-massaging beauty (the gleaming outros of “Song From a Short-Lived TV Series” and “What Gets Me By”, in particular) but little of Surf City’s more combustible qualities. And with the songs often adhering to simple A/B melodic patterns, only a subtle lean on the distortion pedal provides any indication that they’re coming to the chorus now. The penultimate “Oceanic Graphs of the Wilderness”, however, presents exciting new possibilities for this band-- with its looped psych-soul groove, brass accents, and Ira Kaplan-esque guitar freakout, the track serves as a portal to an alternative universe where Surf City have graduated from slackadasical slop-popsters to studio-tweaking sophisticates. Because even these dudes have come to the realization that, as comfy as slumbering on the sofa can be, there’s always the nagging feeling that you could be doing something more productive.
