(Garage/Indie Rock/Pop) Summer Girlfriends - Shockwaves - 2012, MP3, 320 kbps

Chicago’s Summer Girlfriends have pretty straightforward interests as a band: pizza, friends, summertime fun. With their debut album, Shockwaves, the quintet deliver an equally straightforward set of songs built on interwoven guitar lines and punky noise-pop melodies.
Taking cues from the earliest Frankie Rose & the Outs material, the Slumberland Records catalog, and healthy doses of the Ramones, the album’s 11 tracks all have a similarly familiar warmth.
At times, the familiarity of the sound wanes, and begins to feel more calculated than inspired, as on the somewhat rigid title track. This song finds the band sounding their most serious, and even with the Joey Ramone-style melody of the chorus and a head-scratching kazoo solo, the band sounds uncomfortable and wooden throughout the tune. Conversely, there’s plenty of goofy humor on the album, if of an understated sort. Songs like “Goth Beach Party,” “PG-13 Sex Scene,” and “Milo and Danzig” tap into the same kind of “wait, are they kidding or not?” sophomoric lyrics coupled with legitimately catchy tunes that the Dead Milkmen dealt in, just toned down a few thousand degrees. The album wafts around, trying to find some middle ground between winking wit and overly serious sentiments, all soundtracked by pleasantly fuzzy, upbeat pop jams. Best Coast comparisons feel a little more appropriate in Summer Girlfriends’ lesser lyrical moments, as with the “seems so far away/I dream of yesterday”-style passages of “Dirt Under My Nails.” As the relatively short album winds to a close, it leaves the same vague and short-lived impressions as a pool party on a day where it’s too hot to think, or indeed, a casual summer fling. Summer Girlfriends don’t sound completely comfortable as a band on their first outing, but they don’t seem too concerned about it most of the time. Shockwaves succeeds most of the time as drifty, carefree fun and sunny pop vibrations.