Send "Surfer Blood " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Rollingstone |
 Florida's Surfer Blood idealize Nineties alternative rock the way Seventies punks idealized Fifties rock & roll: as a tangible past just distant enough for them to misremember in awesome new ways. Pavement noise scrimmages, warped Pixies surf rock, fresh-faced Weezer tuneage, it's all the same mess to them. But they dress up their guitar-mad escapades in a stadium-echo kick that Nineties indie kids were too grumpy to try. "Swim" is the monster riff-geek odyssey, complete with an Afro-pop breakdown that turns into a gorgeous distortion convulsion; "Twin Peaks" nails the languid pique of classic Rivers Cuomo; every lyric seems to circle around the totally-Nineties theme of wasting away in Zimaville....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| I was not old enough, back when “alternative rock” still had cultural coherence, to know what it was an alternative to. I certainly wasn’t old enough to care. My reaction to the first Weezer album, for instance, was callow and uninformed, which is to say honest; I didn’t even know the Pixies existed until a few years later, by which time rock music’s historical dimension had begun to engage me, intellectually rather than viscerally. That the first bands I loved have all turned out to be derivations and reinventions of other bands, maybe better bands, has never managed to overthrow the glow of that simple, unlearned initial attraction. The best thing I can say for Surfer Blood, who aren’t old enough to have appreciated alternative rock any more contextually than I did, is that they appeal to me the same way. The difference, of course, is that I make it my business now to be an un-innocent listener: I listen intellectually, triangulate influences, seek affinities and precedents and implications as a matter of instinct. And while Astro Coast has plenty of big flashing indices toward other bands, maybe better bands—Weezer and the Pixies, Built to Spill and the Ramones—none evinces a conscious or meaningful alignment. The album is too loose and lazy for that, too unconcerned with its own identity: what elsewhere might constitute a record’s unifying sound—a lonesome surf-rock twang here, a left-hand-unaware-of-the-right volume imbalance there—is picked up and used here incidentally, almost at random. Inspiration-wise, Surfer Blood pick and choose and scavenge and consume with the same obliviousness to pedigree I wish I could get back and probably never will. It’s not a strategy or a statement. It’s what sounds good. I’m making it sound suspiciously like Astro Coast is better for what it isn’t than for what it is, which isn’t really true. Behind its shit-fi insouciance (“Never could be still for long, and I could never hold a job / Coupled with a weakness for cocaine and liquor, not much you can do for love”) are high-caliber songwriting and rhythmic sensibilities; the lesser moments, like the jerky opening to “Take It Easy,” get reined in in short order, in this case by stripping down to a hypnotic groove and going on until someone remembers to stop playing first. The longer songs seem to lag but then pull together seamlessly, to especially lovely effect on “Anchorage.” And a few songs—“Catholic Pagans” and “Fast Jabroni,” for two—are just perfectly executed, slightly messy models of what was always rewarding about alternative rock....full text |
| Onethirtybpm |
| Surfer Blood are a young four-piece from Florida who find themselves in the precarious position of being one of 2010’s “bands to watch,” and I must say their timing has been brilliant. A half-decent long-player scheduled for release in mid-January will always gain praise as “one of the first great albums of the year,” and with the current near-guarantee that it will leak a good six weeks in advance, a little buzz during the release-sparse Christmas build-up can go a long way. Not that I’m suggesting these guys meticulously planned their debut album to leak in November, once the blogs and critics had already filed their copies of Merriweather Post Pavilion and Veckatimest away in a crate marked “2009.” Not at all… Or at least I wouldn’t if so much else about this band didn’t seem so horribly contrived. First of all, there’s the name: Surfer Blood. Why the hell would any band making such surf-friendly music give themselves a moniker like that? Perhaps I’m just getting too old, and it’s so far beyond irony that maybe it is ironic in some bizarre way, but it seems as stupid as the Beach Boys calling themselves the Polar Ice Cap Boys. Then there’s the little nugget of information that keeps getting thrown about – that they played 12 times in four days at last year’s CMJ event. Fair enough, bands have to want it to make it, but talk about over-exposing yourself… Maybe I’m being too cynical, maybe I’m looking at this from an insider’s viewpoint. Maybe I should just let the music speak for itself… At this crucial midpoint, where some readers will conclude I’ve already damned this album to a bad review, let me assure you that is not the case. There isn’t a single track on Astro Coast that I wouldn’t describe, at worst, as “interesting,” and a healthy chunk of it consists of tunes so great that if I were to hear them in, say, a clothing store, I would ask the dude at the counter who the great band playing on the stereo were. The problem is this: if they were playing the album in it’s entirety, I would ask the same question at the end of every track. And this, more so than the annoying name or hideously calculated self-promotion, is my big beef with this album....full text |
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