Call 4 Fun is that CD you fish for while out driving in the summer, buried underneath a dirty work shirt and some old burger wrappers. It’s less than half an hour of garage power-pop that takes itself about as seriously as its finger-tapping guitar solos and songs about kids eating McDonald’s at 3:00 a.m. Actual Water are underachievers who worship simplicity. They make music from the same cro-magnon tools that built rock’n’roll, but the Toronto band do it with a wry smile, playing dumb while being in on the joke.
In 2012, Actual Water said they wanted to be “ABBA with denim jackets on,” an elevator pitch that ably describes where the band landed with Call 4 Fun. But their history of experimentation and relatively stingy album output give these songs some actual dimension. The winding trip went from blown-out, jazzy krautrock on their 2008 LP Double Negative to the more AM-radio 1960s psych of 2011’s The Paisley Orchard. Through the years, band mainstays Gary Pooni and Anthony Nemet have been slowly clipping off the noise and polishing their sound until their love for Neu! and Swell Maps gave way to their love for Sloan and Led Zeppelin.
Pitchfork writer Stuart Berman once called band's journey like "The Beatles evolution in reverse," an arc that continues here with “Latoya", whose polite three-part harmonies and gee-golly lyrics sound ripped right off a broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show. “Latoya” is a fine emblem of how frictionless they sound now. It's one of those shiny pop products that couldn't just come spilling haphazardly out of a basement jam session. It's not necessary to have the context of their early albums to hear the craft that went into this, but it's a large part of what makes Call 4 Fun have a bit more longevity than your average garage record.
The band's pedigree matters far less than the album's hooks. There’s a bit of slurring, New York post-punk on the closer “Gorgeous George”, and a bit of Jerry Lee Lewis piano dancing on “Take The Stairs”, but those just add color to the style they've found. It helps that they don’t aimlessly tour around rock history so much as cull from the best parts of it—or the parts that sound the good after eight cans of Old Style. The guitars sound like they only have one or two pedals hooked up to them. The drums have a boomy Keith Moon feel, and their vocals find a nasally medium between snotty punk and Elvis Costello. Something like “Power Pop Radio” functions like an instruction manual for the album: “Get drunk with your friends so we know we’re not alone,” they sing on the chorus. The song, naturally, is a prototype power pop jam, which continues the long tradition of writing songs about a genre, in the style of that genre.
In just 23 minutes, Actual Water create the feel of a summer full of love and delinquincy. It’s about what could happen if you dialed that phone number in the bathroom stall, the one that says “Call 4 Fun” underneath it. The days could lead to sitting around talking shit about a blowhard named “Waldo Jackson”, or coming home late at night and housing fast food in front of a computer. And while most of these songs are suited for doing donuts in the high school parking lot, there's a funny, kind of poignant moment in "The Wait". It's simply about a ride to somewhere, interminibly delayed: "January through November/ We've been waiting for you." That univsersal feeling of waiting for that guy to come pick you up to take you to that party that's going to rule? Actual Water are definitely that guy, and here they are, so hop in.
