Dana Buoy - Summer Bodies Review

Dana Janssen did that by-now routine thing where he took a break from his freak-folk-experimental-rock band to go into the Thailand jungles with a sampler and come home and sit through a hurricane and produce a love album under the name Dana Buoy (conceivably but not actually because he floated around in a lot of rain during this time). The resulting album Summer Bodies warrants more scrutiny than its routine origins suggest.

Despite the attention given to the album’s tropical origins and influences, the disc largely is (and largely is its best as) a synth-pop record. One of the highlights, “Call to Be” rides on a beat that could be an updated Postal Service cut, but expands its brightness through a wonderful release in the final third of the song, befitting the idea that “This is just a call to be true to you.” The fairly glorious moment of fidelity rises from an underwater plunge and uses that blue beauty as an organizing principle....full text Dana Buoy‘s regular gig is playing percussion for Akron/Family, the indie rock band steeped in rootsy Americana and folk, injected with a heavy dose of electronic psychedelia. On his debut solo release Summer Bodies, Buoy aims for a more tropical musical climate. There are touches of vaguely Caribbean rhythms working their way throughout much of the album, with thick synthesized beats mimicking bass-heavy reggaeton grooves, as on the opening track, “Anatomy of Now”.
Buoy (née Dana Janssen) clearly brought over a handful of Akron/Family tricks. His vocals are often heavily drowned in effects, noise and electronics slither around acoustic instruments, and the focus is always on songcraft, not soundscapes or self-consciously composed music. ...full text Trying to capture the essence of summer can be a tricky thing. It’s one thing to evoke memories of what you were doing in the summer of whenever, but it’s another–and much harder–thing to actually transport you back to that time, letting you experience again the feelings and senses of those days. Dana Buoy (aka Akron/Family percussionist Dana Janssen) has made such an album. Janssen created Summer Bodies in a bungalow near a jungle lagoon in Thailand, which accounts for the balmy atmosphere. And what would summer be without some kind of romance? The initial groundwork for the album was a series of hopeful love notes left on an answering machine. Thailand and telephone love letters might not have been how you spent your summer, but Janssen finds a way to make it all seem relatable.
...full text Summer Bodies is Dana Buoy’s debut album, inspired by the beautiful natural landscapes of Thailand, where he spent some time armed with nothing more than a laptop and an MPC1000. The album was then completed in Brooklyn, by adding live drumming, guitar, thumb piano, analog synthesizers, and iPad apps. You might have heard Dana Jannses’s name listed as one of the members of the experimental rock band Akron/Family; as a fact, the two projects share a lot of artistic similarities.
This “tropicore” album -as the artist defines his own music- is to accompany you as a soundtrack of an imaginary travel in search of adventures....full text