Send "Tennis " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 In May 2010, when homemade indie pop of every stripe was deep in the throes of its baffling obsession with the beach, a new band was taking the music to the next logical place: the open sea. Tennis, we learned, were a married boy-girl duo from Denver, and their earliest circulated mp3s came with an odd story. After finishing college in Colorado, the couple sold their possessions, bought a sailboat, and embarked on an extended trip along the Eastern Seaboard. After returning to land, they began to write and record songs based on their experiences. Their music, as heard here on their full-length debut, touches on tide patterns and shifting winds and sandbars scraping beneath hulls; it also emphasizes the essential romance of the whole adventure-- that they went through it all together. Above all, Tennis strive to evoke an unnamed but certainly more innocent past.Everything about the project comes to us through a thick, triple-folded blanket of nostalgia. From the band's name (a sport that had its peak popularity in the 1970s and 80s) to the overall sound (girl-group pop is the basic template) to the record's cover to the choice of font, it all seems to yearn for one bygone day or another-- the 60s, the 80s, those seven months they spent on the water. The musical structures are straightforward, led by simple guitar lines and rhythms that are either waltz-time invitations to slow dance or more upbeat numbers with the familiar 1-2-pause-3 beat (think the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the Chiffons' "One Fine Day", etc.) so evocative of when Brill Building songwriters ruled the airwaves. The muffled recording, on the other hand, might be an attempt to capture the feel of a cheap AM radio spilling out of a bungalow, but it mostly serves to make the music sound distant and indistinct. Tennis have a good ear for a tune and a solid understanding of how pop songs in this style fit together. The finger-snap-and-voice opening of "Marathon" has an appealingly peppy hook, the guitar twang in "Long Boat Pass" is of the proper vintage, and the melody on "South Carolina" has a nice build to the chorus break. Alaina Moore sings lead and has a likable voice, though her way of stretching vowels, when combined with the dull recording, sometimes makes the words hard to follow. Still, in single-song doses, the music on Cape Dory is pleasant, if not particularly memorable or expressive of anything in particular....full text |
| Popmatters |
| The backstory to Tennis’ anticipated debut Cape Dory is as individual and personal as the band’s music itself: The album is more or less a travelogue of the seven months that married bandmates Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley spent on a small Cape Dory yacht together, with a tracklist announcing ports-of-call along the Atlantic seaboard from “Bimini Bay” to “South Carolina” to “Baltimore”. But more than Cape Dory‘s clever concept, what has really gotten Tennis noticed is its buoyant, head-bobbing pop, which can’t help but recall other nautically inclined bands in feel and theme. At its best, Tennis comes off like a lo-fi Beach Boys on a cloudy east coast day or a more classically indie Vampire Weekend, just as jaunty even without the world music pretentions. That’s not to say, though, that you necessarily need to tap into Cape Dory‘s conceit to appreciate the record, because the partly sunny sentiments the duo conjures up shine through even stronger than the mental images of cruising the seven seas. In that regard, it’s with its indie-pop contemporaries that Tennis shares the most in common—just imagine the Pains of Being Pure at Heart with more of a golden oldies fetish or Real Estate with more sparkle than twang in its jingle-jangle sound. And if you thought that the lo-fi girl-group revival had already played itself out, you won’t be once you hear the way Moore’s ooo’s, ah’s, and la’s express desire even better than her evocative lyrics. So while knowing what went into the making of Cape Dory adds to the album’s sense of romance and adventure, there’s something about the easy interplay and intimate give-and-take between Moore and Riley that’s obviously on a more intuitive and intangible level....full text |
| Prettymuchamazing |
| Cape Dory arrives amidst the most brilliant bit of self-marketing by a new band since a pair of “siblings” named Jack and Meg White emerged from Detroit wearing red, white, and black. The story behind the band’s genesis, which you probably already know (Tennis is your new favorite band, right?), is so novel that its veracity is beside the point. It goes something like this: Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore, a now-married couple from Denver, scrounged for six years, bought a sailboat (the titular Cape Dory), and escaped their landlocked lives for adventure on the Atlantic. Early into the couple’s trip along the Eastern Seaboard, they discovered they had both played music in the past and had a passion to do it again. One night in a Florida Keys bar, while a Shirelles song played overhead, they decided to give songwriting a shot. After their trip was cut short (and after they were wedded on the deck of the Cape Dory), Riley and Moore returned to their old lives and wrote songs about their seven-month journey. Those songs became the musical travelogue known as Cape Dory. Tennis was born. The story, which has gained the band instant indie interest, threatens to overshadow the music itself. The Myth of Tennis would be nothing more than cheap fodder for music journalists if Cape Dory weren’t so stunning. This is music that shimmers, sparkles, and swoons. Cape Dory is packed from stern to bow with lovely melodies, often delivered in the form of “oooohs,” “aaaaaaahs,” and “sha-na-nas.” Thin verses, driven by simple guitar hooks, give way to woozy, exuberant choruses. Toward the end of “Long Boat Pass,” arguably the album’s finest track, Moore sings with such joy and longing at once that I catch my breath every time I hear it. No origin story, however charming, can touch a moment like that....full text |
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