In hindsight, Eternal Summers might've reconsidered their name. The Virginia band formed in 2009, during indie rock's brief beach craze, and that sunny moniker made it mighty easy to group them with all those other acts making nostalgic, heavily reverbed pop, even though their own take on the style had more of a wiry, punk edge. That they shared bills with Best Coast and Dum Dum Girls only further typecast them. "We came out at a time when jangly, summertime and beachy songs were a thing. And we got lumped in together," singer/guitarist Nicole Yun recently lamented. "I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted our music to sound more sonically distorted and aggressive than all that."
Most of the big names from the beach boom have fallen on hard times, either breaking up, fading away, or struggling to recapture their early spark, but Eternal Summers have proven more adaptive than many of the bands they came up with. Over the years they've added a member, bassist Jonathan Woods, who helped the duo fill some of their considerable empty space, and gradually built up their sound into something far statelier than the scrappy pop of their initial singles, adopting moves from shoegaze, C86 pop, and a wide array of '90s alternative. Gold and Stone, the band's fourth album in five years, is the latest testament to their ever-broadening range.
As might be expected from an album released so soon after last year's The Drop Beneath and recorded at the same Austin, Texas studio, the record picks up where its predecessor left off, expanding on the anthemic grandeur that record introduced. The group remains loyal to their usual muses—Galaxie 500, most prominently—but they continue to reshuffle those influences into some surprising configurations. At its most vibrant, Gold and Stone recalls another recent dream-pop album with an unsettled infrastructure, A Sunny Day in Glasgow's Sea When Absent, especially in its embrace of interruption. Whenever things begin to feel too complacent—whenever the guitars shimmer too blissfully for too long—there's always a shake-up on the horizon. The moody strums of opener "Unassigned" give way to shots of feedback and clatter. The plucky single "Together or Alone" cuts its chipper groove with hysteric shouts.
Though Yun usually defaults to the sweet, celestial voice of so many shoegaze singers, she's not afraid to roll in the mud, too. On "Black Diamond" she adopts a punk sneer to shame an over-controlling lover—"If you want I could be strung up in pearls for you," she sings, her voice raw with contempt—and she works herself into a huffy fit on the album's fiercest rocker, "Play Dead", another kiss-off. These heated moments are aberrations, little breaks from the Eternal Summers' default dreaminess, but they show so much personality that it's hard not to wish there were a few more of them. Agitation flatters this band.
In interviews, Yun has explained that Eternal Summers record under self-imposed deadlines, which would explain their efficient, album-a-year clip. Those deadlines also seem to have shaped the band's compact songwriting. There are moments on Gold and Stone when it seems like these songs long to wander off, to further explore some of these textures and moods, but not a single track extends past the four-minute mark, almost as if out of fear of throwing the album off its tight schedule. Yun's grown into such a sharp guitar player that a logical next step for the band might be to toss the timeline out the window for their fifth album and record an unchecked, sprawling epic in the style of one of the more unlikely bands the group has cited as recent inspiration, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. Or they could just return to the same studio for a week to cut another album as concise and efficient as this one. It speaks to Eternal Summers' versatility that either sounds like a winning proposition.
