In May 2010, when homemade indie pop of every stripe was deep in the throes of its baffling obsession with the beach, a new band was taking the music to the next logical place: the open sea. Tennis, we learned, were a married boy-girl duo from Denver, and their earliest circulated mp3s came with an odd story. After finishing college in Colorado, the couple sold their possessions, bought a sailboat, and embarked on an extended trip along the Eastern Seaboard. After returning to land, they began to write and record songs based on their experiences. Their music, as heard here on their full-length debut, touches on tide patterns and shifting winds and sandbars scraping beneath hulls; it also emphasizes the essential romance of the whole adventure-- that they went through it all together. Above all, Tennis strive to evoke an unnamed but certainly more innocent past.
Everything about the project comes to us through a thick, triple-folded blanket of nostalgia. From the band's name (a sport that had its peak popularity in the 1970s and 80s) to the overall sound (girl-group pop is the basic template) to the record's cover to the choice of font, it all seems to yearn for one bygone day or another-- the 60s, the 80s, those seven months they spent on the water. The musical structures are straightforward, led by simple guitar lines and rhythms that are either waltz-time invitations to slow dance or more upbeat numbers with the familiar 1-2-pause-3 beat (think the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the Chiffons' "One Fine Day", etc.) so evocative of when Brill Building songwriters ruled the airwaves. The muffled recording, on the other hand, might be an attempt to capture the feel of a cheap AM radio spilling out of a bungalow, but it mostly serves to make the music sound distant and indistinct.
Tennis have a good ear for a tune and a solid understanding of how pop songs in this style fit together. The finger-snap-and-voice opening of "Marathon" has an appealingly peppy hook, the guitar twang in "Long Boat Pass" is of the proper vintage, and the melody on "South Carolina" has a nice build to the chorus break. Alaina Moore sings lead and has a likable voice, though her way of stretching vowels, when combined with the dull recording, sometimes makes the words hard to follow. Still, in single-song doses, the music on Cape Dory is pleasant, if not particularly memorable or expressive of anything in particular.
The problem comes when the music is taken at album length. Even though these 10 songs clock in at less than 30 minutes, their cumulative effect is weirdly numbing. Part of it is up to the central conceit: An extended getaway on a sloop is nice enough image, but is the allure of this one fantasy enough to sustain a record? Not when there is so little personality emanating from the songs themselves. Say what you will about Jimmy Buffett, an artist most people I know consider to be among the most loathsome of the modern popular era, but his tales of island hopping and boat drinks have a sense of humor and an identifiable point of view. Tennis, conversely, seem content to hit their marks, replicate an established style, and let the associations that come with a familiar sound do the emotional work. Bizarrely, considering the detailed and unique backstory, which describes something these two went through and which most of us will never experience even if we wanted to, Cape Dory comes over as a depersonalized exercise. It seems too concerned about transmitting a very specific sound and getting all the nautical details right. So while the record is pretty and intermittently enjoyable, it feels one-note and ultimately flat.
