By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring a pair of dreamy Los Angeles based pop projects, including Famous Friend’s TANLINES and Kai Tak’s DESIGNED IN HEAVEN MADE IN HONG KONG!
Famous Friend – TANLINES
Genre: Beach Goth, Dream Pop
Favorite Tracks: “Tanlines,” “Nora”
There are few musical descriptors as aesthetically pleasing to consider as “beach goth,” an idea that is so visual in its phrasing and so simple in its construction that you don’t even really need a musical example to properly explain it. You could argue the sound was perfected with either “Close To Me” by the Cure in 1985 or “Disorder” by Joy Division in 1979, true goth pioneers experimenting with bright, conventional surf and pop rhythms. And you’d probably be right. But it’s been fascinating to see a cottage industry erected around the rise of bedroom recordings featuring that summer bummer sound over the last decade—admittedly there is a whole generation of artists I’ve spent too much time writing about on this site, both big and small, that are exploring this sound, combining various musical ideas from jangle pop, lo-fi bedroom rock, hypnagogic pop, post-punk, synthpop, and, of course, surf music into whatever we could consider “beach goth” to be today.
Zach Carlson makes music under the moniker Famous Friend, and his latest EP, TANLINES, features a sonic optimism that touches the earnest, gray-skied beach sound of The Drums’ earliest works fused with plenty of contemporary, late-night bedroom acts ranging from vhs sports to Makeout City. The title track is a warbly, playful single that engages so directly with the genre’s thesis, a neon-drenched, day-into-night love song taking place on the coast with lines like: “20 more seconds / To let everything sink in / Before you go for a swim,” or, “Take your time / Walkin in a straight line / Burning up / Party in the sunshine / I just wanna Trace along your tanlines.” The yearning throughout it is slick, fast, and intense, but like the best in the genre, it finds a sense of imagined nostalgia by the end.
The sound on TANLINES (as well as Carlson’s excellent new single “Blue”) is dreamier than his earlier work, a sense of warped, endearing space on each track; the music strikes an important balance between landing full-throated pop melodies amidst spindly, dayglow production—this sound is lo-fi in theory only, finding the dark intimacy of that tone while in actuality delivering big, soaring radio cuts. The EP’s best song, “Nora,” has a brilliant, visceral sincerity to it, with the imagined nostalgia on the opening track made more intensely real the more we too fall in love with Nora. The closing track “Prism (Better Than This)” is TANLINES most reserved song, a springy, mid-tempo clap propelling it, but by the end we find some finality to that yearning explored on the opening track.
From Double Wish to Sports Coach to Lost Film, we’ve had quite a history as a magazine of booking bands that flirt with these ideas and sounds in one form or another. That’s why it shouldn’t have been too surprising to see Famous Friend headlining our upcoming ninth anniversary showcase. But you should grab a copy of the EP over on Bandcamp and then snag a ticket to our show on August 22nd anyway! [CJ Simonson]
Kai Tak – DESIGNED IN HEAVEN MADE IN HONG KONG
Genre: Dream Pop, Trip Hop, Ethereal Wave
Favorite Tracks: “No Better Tomorrow,” “Flood the Harbour,” “Midnight Pretender”
This tremendous record awakens with the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing at Hong Kong Kai Tak International Airport.” Well then, brace yourselves for the landing, because these colossal, lustrous trip hop songs are going to come crashing down to grace your ears. DESIGNED IN HEAVEN MADE IN HONG KONG is the fantastic debut by Los Angeles-based music collective Kai Tak, led by Chris King of post-punk band Cold Showers. The project, named after the retired Hong Kong airport, is a triumph for its firm grasp over transportive atmosphere. All the crowd chatter from the region’s Tsim Sha Tsui district that’s sneakily snuck into each song grounds the immersion of seeing flashy metropolises with a hazy-green tint. The trip hop and dream pop leanings are also authentic—echoes of these genres’ stalwarts, from Sneaker Pimps to Cocteau Twins, are sewn into the fabric of this filmlike album. There’s not a dull note to be heard.
Features from dream pop-adjacent artists in LA give King a helping hand. The introductory one-two punch, “No Better Tomorrow” and “Flood the Harbour,” contain the voices of Chesley Boy and There’s Talk and Tamaryn, respectively. The almost-post-rock opener is ignited by scintillating synthesizers and massive drum work, while its follow-up adopts shoegazing drones and a swaying, baggy groove that’d fit splendidly on CCFX’s self-titled EP. “Villains in my Mind” carries a gothic rock sensibility from Foie Gras’ strikingly divine vocal delivery. Meanwhile, “Midnight Pretender” is driven by stadium-sized percussion and massive synth leads, easily the most lavish pop number. On the closer, “Until We Leave From Here,” King ingrains the sense of place that defines Kai Tak by integrating traditional Asian instrumentation with dream pop stylings largely proliferated by Western acts. It’s an uplifting, wondrous crossover of musical aesthetics.
Where this flight takes you is open to interpretation, but it is always an inspired, daring voyage through vaporous guitars. Such excellence of this genre is often a rarity, but the vivid imagining of place—in this case, being airborne, thousands of feet above the earth—is just as hard to come by. That’s a beautiful thing. You can check out Kai Tak’s lofty traversal over on Bandcamp. [Dom Lepore]
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