Depending on where you lay your head most nights, the term "summer jam" can trigger a wide variety of feelings and sounds. Birthday sex? The best you ever had? Sure, but that's a different kind of summer heat altogether. What if you live in a place where, save for some nasty winds every now and again, summer seems like the season and state-of-mind all year round? There are never any icy sidewalks to brave, fewer windshields to scrape, and bands aren't throwing 'bows for cramped rehearsal spaces-- just miles of hot beach, palm trees, and outdoor dining all day every day. Foreign Born are an L.A. indie rock outfit that exist further west and outside of the Smell or Silver Lake, a band that seems to have germinated over the years outside all semblances of scene in a city whose guitar music rarely sounds genuinely Californian. I'm writing from the opposite coast, but Foreign Born have made a record that feels like a conversation with the Pacific coastline and sounds like endless summer.
That's harder to do well than one might think. Before assembling Person to Person, their second full-length and first for Secretly Canadian, Foreign Born were a band whose rootless pop rocks were still in search of a way to do its geography proud. They branched out, taking layers of vaguely African percussive styles and made them bedrock for frothy, weightless guitar rock. No matter how muscular or tethered to the ground, each four-minute burst sounds as though it could float up and away. Take opener "Blood Oranges" and the way it traipses out a series of firefly guitar figures before the roto toms kick and the song guns it into sun showers. It's a shift from light to shadow, tiny to epic, and it bolsters these songs even when the drums aren't banging. "That Old Sun" and "Winter Games" are sweaty BBQ squealers (The Band! The Allman Brothers!) minus the spillage, frontbrah Matt Popieluch's bronzy vocals a fine match for a mix that always feel controlled, no matter how free or insanely vivid. What's more, Popieluch earns his nonprofit daycheck working in L.A. parks, a job that's sure to build a lyricbook rife with images bright enough to make a dude shield his eyes.
Next to the textural anthemics of "Vacationing People", the highlife guitar runs of "Early Warnings" anchor a first half every bit as airtight as its comedown second. Closer "Wait in This Chair" is easy living, and the final 85 seconds of "See Us Home" is the best Coldplay send-off since TV on the Radio snaked a page out of that band's gameplan just last year: gorgeous, wave-of-the-hand melodicism that takes your feet from you better than riptides. So soon after Vampire Weekend in particular has been able to convince kids to steal their parents' copies of *Graceland, Foreign Born's use of African music here don't smack of trendhopping or wonky appropriation. Guitarist Lewis Pesacov and drummer Garrett Ray have been studying and nerding out with these sounds in L.A. clubs for years, equally seamless fruits of which can also be heard in their work with Afro-Hebrew collective Fool's Gold. You can tell that these songs were shaped and sculpted and polished ten times over, the attention to detail and space a welcome step away from the often sloppy clumps of no-fi ruckus clattering up from garages and out of bedrooms everywhere right about now. That music makes sense during a claustrophobic January, but why bother. *Person to Person should prove just as satisfying to watch blossom by the time we're there again.
