Neverever – Angelic Swells (2010)

We have quite a lot of visitors here in London from Finland. Many of our friends, while here, want to go shopping for records. I'm very happy about this, because it introduces me to a lot of new music. One of my friends bought this album on a CD from Rough Trade East along with many other CDs. I remembered this album later on when I saw the vinyl version costing only £10. I bought it so now I own the album on vinyl. Neverever's debut album is a mixture of great many genres. It has some pop, some rock n' roll, some punk and it's all quite lo-fi when it comes to sounds. There are similarities to many bands from the early 80's that had gotten their influences from the early punk, but took their music to a more melodic direction. To mention a few, Orange Juice, The Go-Go's and Television.



I don't think this album is very original, but if you happen to like lo-fi sounding pop punk with laid back beach attitude, this might be right up your alley. In one review that I read about this album, the writer said that this is basically taking Glasgow sound to LA beach. I think that description makes a lot of sense, because many of the songs do resemble early 80's Glasgow bands and the band is actually from LA, where they have picked up the 50's and 60's American surf rock attitude of being really laid-back.

Their music video for Coconut Shampoo shows perfectly what kind of a band we're talking about here. The band looks incredibly hipster and the video is about goofing around town in LA with lots of kissing. It's like a polished image of beautiful youngsters in LA spending their days on the beach without a care in the world. This is the kind of image that is given of LA through films and media, when in real world, I don't think anyone actually has time for being so lazy in such a stressful culture.

Apparently the band was previously called Champagne Socialists, which kind of fits to the image I just described here. Some fans of their early recordings seemed not to like this debut album, because the sounds are too polished and it's not as crummy as the early recordings that were just recorded with one take in a cellar somewhere. I think these kinds of comments are incredibly elitist, especially considering that we're not talking about very clear production with this album's sounds.

This is the kind of music I'd like to listen to in a beach party while gulping down frozen margaritas and eating fresh from the sea fish tacos. So, I think this band must have a very enthusiast following in their home town. Living in mostly cold countries in Northern Europe, I don't think I get too many situations where this would be just the right kind of genre to listen to, but every once in a while it sounds really cool and fun. I think in the long run you might get quite bored with this band quite quickly, but in small doses this is a great band.

Listen to the album on Spotify.