Surfer Blood have performed in 5 continents, toured with heroes like The Pixies and Guided By Voices, played on TV, at Coachella and giant festivals throughout the world, while also occasionally plugging in their amps at all-ages house parties. The group followed suit with the Tarot Classics EP (2011), Pythons (2013) and 1000 Palms (2015). Surfer Blood began recording and touring immediately behind their infectious debut, Astro Coast (2010) and quickly took over almost the entire world (except for the deepest realms of the ocean and really, really cold places). New members Mikey McCleary and Lindsey Mills also attended the same high school. Surfer Blood are a magnificent indie rock band from West Palm Beach, Florida that formed when guitarist/vocalist John Paul Pitts and drummer Tyler Schwarz started playing better-than-great musical notes together in Dreyfoos High School. Surfer Blood get better and better with each album, and we’re betting that they’ll be making great records for many years to come. The immediacy is intoxicating and the results are fantastic. John Paul Pitts wrote and mixed the album alone, for the first time since their debut Astro Coast. Along with plenty of Surfer Blood’s signature catchy pop hooks, the band also concocted several epic and more complex songs with enormous attention to sonic detail. It sounds like an analysis of the space where excuses and manning up come together, where the hide starts to get a little thicker, but there are still plenty of cracks in the armor to let in those surprising swatches of cold air.SURFER BLOOD’s fourth album, Snowdonia, (in stores Feb 3, 2017) is a return to their DIYrecording roots, and at the same time, an ambitious step forward, musically and lyrically. Surfer Blood do a great job of taking the transition point of powerless young-man-dom and making it sound like the point where the wings have been clipped some, where there have been some burn marks made for showing off and where there's still a good helping of refusal to fall into complacency with the outcomes that may be. ![]() Pitts sings on "Harmonix," "I won't wait around for the ice to thaw out now," seemingly suggesting that there have been some concessions made and he'll be damned if he's just going to go on playing the fool, hoping that everything changes and gets made right for he knows that the odds are long. There's disappointment within these songs and there's the sense that it's just the beginning. The stories in these songs sound as if they're coming from the perspective not of a guy getting trampled on for the first time, but perhaps this is the third or fourth time and some things have become quite a bit clearer to him, however, some clarity still doesn't make for a settled spirit. It's the lyrics that Pitts puts to the songs on "Astro Coast," completed by the playing of TJ Schwarz, Thomas Fekete, Brian Black and Marcos Marchesani, that give the whole experience a feel of time on the run or threatened innocence. Pitts sings and it hits you the way those pockets of cold air hit you occasionally in the summertime - particularly in lower-lying areas near a body of water - where things are happening in the air and amidst the hot stuffiness comes a small patch of oddly cool air. There's a cool air to the words that lead singer J.P. It's a record that should be played when you've thought about all of the different ways that your situation could have gone and, even after having done this, there are still more questions than you'd like there to be and there are still billions of head games that are being staged up in your cobwebs, up where the passionate parts of the head are still lit up like Las Vegas Boulevard - red and white hot and every other color of illumination imaginable. It's a record that should be played when you've had your heart crushed and you just might be getting on to feeling a little better, but that's all relative. ![]() "Astro Coast" isn't beach blanket music to play beneath a sparkling night sky, as the salt from the crashing waters seeps into your hair and skin without you even noticing it and the sand forms a new later of skin on the bottoms of your feet. The group of young men from West Palm Beach, Florida, aren't at all about or for the perma-tan that many might be too willing to pin on them. While it is the basis and part of the execution of every song on the record, that warmth is limited, almost a decoy that can be so easily deceptive that you can still feel caught up in it even when it's impossible. It does not keep rippling, hitting you with wave after wave of hot degrees. The warmth of Surfer Blood's debut album, "Astro Coast," isn't perpetual.
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