By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Sam Blasucci’s second solo outing in 18 months, the groovy lounge pop record REAL LIFE THING, and Chinese American Bear’s irreverent psych pop album WAH!!!
Sam Blasucci – REAL LIFE THING
Genre: Soft Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Lounge Pop
Favorite Tracks: “Behind Closed Eyes,” “Witching Hour,” “Fade To Black”
Splintering off from his main project Mapache, in less than 18 months Sam Blasucci fast-tracked a solo career with not one, but two, records under his own name, 2023’s cover-filled OFF MY STARS and 2024’s REAL LIFE THING. If Mapache’s sound has been largely defined by wooly, wood-paneled psych rock and jammy, at-times-Dead’y, front-porch Americana, Blasucci’s solo material keeps the scarce production of his band’s best work but lays further into a stringier soft rock production. This admittedly subtle shift isn’t without precedent—artists like Drugdealer, Sam Evian, Babe Rainbow, Cass McCombs, and even latter-day Real Estate have found ways to blur the line between yacht rock(ish) rhythms and crunchy psychedelia, an entire modern genre (one that Mapache also dabble in, it should be noted) operating on the hypothetical question, “What if Christopher Cross had set sail with Weir and Garcia instead?”
Not without its gentle meandering, Blasucci’s solo work to date has colored a bit more inside the lines than Mapache, and REAL LIFE THING is defined by short, quieting guitar odysseys (“Do It For Your Love,” “Fade To Black”), rollicking Emmit Rhodes riffs (“No Magic,” “Death”), and some of the best lounge pop you’ll hear on an album all year (“Behind Closed Eyes,” “Tea & Pixies”). It’s all there in opener “Howl At The Moon,” which with its funky stomp escalates ripping saxophone solos and cooing background singers. Like many songs on REAL LIFE THING, it feels like a live recording—the lightning-in-a-bottle work of strangely unforgettable, bafflingly tight late-night jazz set on a cruise liner somewhere in the Pacific. Blasucci’s ability to keep his singer-songwriter sound shaggy enough to feel jam-adjacent but buttoned-up enough to have that Wrecking Crew dazzle should be studied by people for years to come. You can listen to it over on Bandcamp!
Chinese American Bear – WAH!!!
Genre: Neo-Psychedelia, Pop
Favorite Tracks: “Weekend in Chinatown ((唐人街周末)),” “Feelin’ Fuzzy (毛绒绒的感觉),” “Take Me To Beijing (一起回北京)”
WAH!!! is as irreverent as the three exclamation point onomatopoeia title would suggest. On their sophomore album, Seattle-based duo Chinese American Bear continue to mash up playfully simple bilingual choruses with reedy psychedelia and springy jangle pop. Like their self-titled debut back in 2022, WAH!!! is filled top to bottom with an ear-catching circularity; as the slow-paced drum machines lay a foundation for sparse, technicolor synths and guitar parts, Anne Tong’s staccato, hypnotic vocal delivery moves into the foreground, her mix of Chinese and English becoming as much a part of the bubbling rhythm section as a catalyst for their light-hearted lyrics.
The duo’s sonic identity is perhaps best explained through “Weekend in Chinatown ((唐人街周末)),” an immediately joyful earworm that builds up production elements as it goes along, ranging from a dazzling, waterfalling synth part to an almost-‘50s lap steel guitar sound. Tong’s cheeky hopefulness about waiting for the weekend to arrive is refreshingly no-frills pop. To some degree, these elements are the baseline of WAH!!!—a little bit goofy, a little bit sincere, and enthrallingly fun. Sometimes these ideas are turned down a bit, like the comparatively twee downtempo cuts “Love You (爱你)” and “Heartbreaker (伤心情歌),” and sometimes they’re ratcheted up, like the maximalist lead single “Feelin’ Fuzzy (毛绒绒的感觉),” a wide-eyed, over-the-top spectacle of groovy guitar work that features Tong’s silliest (and strongest) performance to date. If the template is flipped at all on WAH!!! at any point, it’s with the sobering closer “Take Me To Beijing (一起回北京),” a dreary, emotionally intense homecoming; we end on a synthwave song that may as well be a long-ost Italians Do It Better rarity—we’re heading to China with the sunset to our backs. It’s a strong way to close out an album where levity is in strong supply, and hearing them change up their own formula is refreshing. Grab a copy over on Bandcamp (and be sure to catch their very fun show if it’s coming to a town near you)!
Comments