Send "Summer Camp " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Condale, the California town that's the focal point of UK indie pop duo Summer Camp's debut LP, Welcome to Condale, doesn't actually exist. It was invented by SC members Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley; to drive the whole conceptual thing home, the band's created a zine pressed in limited physical quantities and available to view on their website (hint: click on "Condale"); along with narrative-extending diary entries and fake interviews with faker bands, there's the cover to a 1977 issue of Penthouse, a poster for the obscure 1974 skin flick Teenage Milkmaid, and the cover of the February 27, 1984 issue of Jet, which features an image of Brooke Shields and Michael Jackson together. On the upper right corner of the band's website, there's a by-the-minute update on the current date and time-- with two small alterations: the year is listed as 1984, and it's specified that no matter where you are, you're living under "Condale Time" for the moment.Obviously, Warmsley and Sankey went to great lengths to create this world, and in a way it's impressive, but the non-musical aspects of Welcome to Condale (especially the "zine" portion, which eschews the personal-cultural DIY nature of the form in favor of signifier-collecting scrapbook nostalgia) highlights the pair's predilection for time-distanced cultural references. Anyone who listened to last year's Young EP could have seen this coming, as Sankey sang about "A boy dressed like Teen Wolf" and friends taking photos "with Polaroid cameras" on a song titled after Winona Ryder's character in Heathers. Still, their (sometimes ironic, sometimes not) devotion to the past is persistent, especially in the face of the growing realization that such devotion in indie culture is exhausting itself: in the video for Welcome to Condale single "Better Off Without You", Sankey sings her punchy part under an Instagram'd filter, juxtaposed by vintage-looking footage of teen-focused films. Warmsley is seen playing some guitar, wearing a "wolf shirt" (something he's known to wear, it seems). As some people tend to forget, indie pop's relationship with the past is part of the genre's lifeblood, with bands using out-of-time images and cultural figures to create their own little universes, away from the pain of modern life. Summer Camp, on the other hand, collect such influences like Pogs (a bit of cultural ephemera untouched by these two, thus far at least) and merely throw 'em out here and there, without context or relation to the music. Witness the ill-juxtaposed vocal samples that open the lost-youth lament "Summer Camp", a far cry from the Tough Alliance's personal-is-political use of a key line from John Cassavetes' Shadows on "A New Chance", or the fact that the album's swaggering bedroom-arena highlight, "Brian Krakow", takes its name from the nerdy character on "My So-Called Life". The song's a bit of a brilliant kiss-off-but-not-really anthem, featuring a rare lead vocal turn from Warmsley that, truth be told, carries more bold confidence than the actual (fictional) Krakow could have ever possessed....full text |
| Bbc |
| In the opening chapter to Jon Savage’s Teenage, he contrasts the lives of two young people who rose to prominence in the late 1800s, and gave rise to the perception of those formative years as a state separate from childhood and adulthood: Russian debutante Marie Bashkirtseff and Massachusetts murderer Jesse Pomeroy. Whilst they were notorious for very different reasons – respectively indulgent memoirs and infanticide – their legends achieved maximum potency due to the hasty ends to their lives. Bashkirtseff died of tuberculosis, Pomeroy was confined to prison for the rest of his days, leaving images of them frozen in time forever. It’s conjuring similarly precise portraits of this fertile, fervid period that makes London duo Summer Camp’s debut album, Welcome to Condale, such a success. When the pair first came to the fore two years ago, hiding behind old sepia pictures and pretending they were six Swedish teenagers, bloggers aligned them with the chillwave movement. Listening back to early demos, they’re characterised by a sultry, languid drift, songs imploring a paramour never to leave some halcyon moment. However, the band – eventually unmasked as Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey – fast moved away from ideas of spinning out endless summers into developing their own world of twisted youth, transferring the Swedes idea into the cast that populates these songs. Condale, an accompanying fanzine explains, is an LA town where kids run wild in the mansions of dead movie stars, full of torrid love letters and ambitious, worthy mission statements from the town’s local band (so, not dissimilar to John Hughes’ Shermer). It’s inessential to enjoying the album, but demonstrates their commitment to creating a world that rings true thanks to precision rather than cloudy vagaries. Most importantly of all, there’s no doubting the intent that blazes through the individual songs on the record. The pair acts out power struggles between characters, dominating and demeaning, breaking up and getting back together with the cavalier flamboyance that fades in adult relationships. On opener Better Off Without You – think a bra-burning Shangri-Las – Elizabeth rails pityingly about the drag of a boy who can’t stop calling, tartly stating "there is no me and you". The following song, Brian Krakow (named after a character from My So Called Life – a little odd in their otherwise original story), sees Jeremy’s character laying down the aloof but alluring conditions on which he’s willing to submit to a girl. The power struggles come to a hilt on highlight Losing My Mind, a series of despondencies and ultimatums spelled out through clever line exchanges: "You you you’re wasting my time / Time time I was moving on / On on on honest to god…...full text |
| Guardian |
| Had they formed in the 80s, London boy‑girl duo Summer Camp would have been a fixture on brat pack film soundtracks. Their dreamy debut is shot through with regard for the years when synth-pop ruled the charts and Molly Ringwald was a national sweetheart. Typical is the hazy "Summer Camp", which samples Kelly LeBrock in John Hughes's Weird Science, while the euphoric "1988" is Toni Basil by way of indie-pop. But Welcome to Condale doesn't fetishise the past, its love-gone-wrong lyrics and snatches of chillwave lending Summer Camp a sound that is theirs alone....full text |
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