Even in the age of the internet, you never really know what's going on in a particular music scene until you actually take a trip there. I was reminded of this first-hand when, in 2004, I came back from Melbourne with an armful of terrific local bands about which I'd never even heard a whisper in this part of the world. A similar thing happened a few years back, when our shop's owner Greg came back from New Zealand with a few surprising chestnuts for the staff. Foremost among these was the first EP by Surf City—a noisy combo playing wildly fuzzed-out indie pop in the vein of Clinic, The Jesus And Mary Chain and that proud lineage of undersung Kiwi pop like The Chills and The Clean. It was a succinctly perfect little six-song debut—a total gem.
Now, after a little longer than we'd have expected (or liked), the band has finally put together Kudos, their first full-length. Coming off an EP that so well paired the brevity of the format to the band's uptempo style, it was always going to be interesting to see how they faired over the course of an LP, and Kudos does have a few tunes that reveal a more languid side. Tempos are more to the middle rather than the breakneck rush of EP standouts like "Headin' Inside". One track, the swirly, motorik workout "Icy Lakes", even runs just shy of eight minutes. But even on more drawn-out songs, the spirit of the band remains intact: all clangy and reverberated, Surf City make a most beautiful type of nonsense. Their music is not about any real literal meaning, but instead the thrill of playing primal and primitive pop music at really loud volumes in a basement—one where the PA system isn't quite loud enough to really make out the vocals, so the singer resorts to shouting non-sequitur mantras and catchy "oo-oo-oos" over and over just for the experience of letting it out.
And if you take the basement metaphor one step further as a comment on the overall isolation a New Zealand group has from any scene but their local one, it says something terrific about Surf City's approach: they're pure. This is honest pop music played by people in love with the feeling it brings them. That's it. Sometimes that says and means more to a listener than even the most well-crafted lyrics. Underrated and well worth your ears.