handsomeyoungstranger:

Coasting - ‘Portland’ (You’re Never Going Back)
[bandcamp][M’lady’s]

This is Coasting’s first album, including new versions of a few of the tracks they’d previously released on 7” and cassette - they’re currently based in Memphis (Madison Farmer, guitar/vocals) and Portland, OR (Fiona Campbell, drums/vocals). I’ve been pretty excited about what they put out so far, tempered only by finding it unusually difficult to buy it from Ireland. (The album was out in the US in November, but the physical UK release is May 2012, and there’s $11 in postage in the balance.) 

You’re Never Going Back mostly lands in the garage/surf/girl band overlap, great big noise built from limited components: drums, guitar, dual vocals and drawn-out ‘oh’s. ‘Starts and Stays’ opens, with a moment at the end of the chorus when it goes from the impatience of “I just can’t wait for this” to sounding ten types of wistful for “I just can’t wait for you”. It’s a pretty economical shift, but it’s clever and characteristic of the band: simple enough lyrics gaining a lot of nuance in the delivery.

There’s a melancholy in the vocals that could be mistaken for jaded, or at least following archetypes. ‘For Hours’ has a tinge of Best Coast and time dying off while waiting, but on closer listening, the lyrics are action-packed, and ‘Same Old, Same Old’ starts off sounding girl band naive (“when I first met you”) before going somewhere more knowing (“I didn’t know/how broken you were/it didn’t show”). ‘Snoozefest’, meanwhile, starts out with “I don’t care if you sleep in my bed/I don’t care if you sleep on the floor” and then puts this huge surging emphasis on ‘on the floor’, gorgeously nonsensical but catchy as fuck.

‘Portland’ centres around “how can you leave this place/won’t you stay”/”why can’t we leave this place/where should we go”, strong on riff/thump/’oh oh oh’, with questioning vocals where the second half of each line is nearly inhaled at the beginning. I’ve a bias towards this kind of thing, especially songs about places or songs about places that aren’t really about those places, and there’s nothing I don’t love about ”you replied/we would rather stay inside/anywhere we are is home” in the second verse. It’s a great album that improves with each listen, but that one line is absolutely perfect.

(Five stars for Gorilla vs. Bear’s “chill needlepoint leopard” description of the cover.)