Just as we’d filed our albums of the decade list, tucked TLOBF off to bed for 2009 and started circling the Radio Times, one of our favourite bands that we’ve discovered this year, Summer Camp (we gave you their cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ back in October), go and upload a sparkling new track to their Myspace that we couldn’t possibly wait until January to rhapsodize about.
Like the four existing songs on their Myspace, ‘Round The Moon’ starts with a quote from a 1980s film classic – John Hughes’ ‘Sixteen Candles’, with the haplessly lovely Sam Baker (Molly Ringwald) saying, “I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek,” but rather than the backseat chorus of dreamy girlish tones that we’ve bordered on obsessing over since they first uploaded ‘Ghost Train’ back in October, there’s a chap on dulcet vocal duties! His rumbling lament is so processed and lo-fi that there’s no telling quite what he’s on about, but it’s got that unruffled nonchalance that intimates that he’s probably a really ace guy who reads The Believer and knows how to treat a girl good. Obviously that’s just speculation – being the mysterious folk that they are, we still only know that:
- There’s more than one of them, boys and girls.
- They probably don’t hail from Sweden like they first claimed to be.
- They’re holed up in London recording at the moment.
- They’re playing SXSW! And deservedly so indeed.
There’s been much written recently about “glo-fi” and “chillwave” (which sounds like a L’Oreal product if you ask me) and evoking pink-tinged Super 8 teenage summers that only existed in our grey British dreams. If Washed Out is the comedown from the utopian gauzy beach party, then Summer Camp are the band who played the prom the night before, peppier than their morning after bedfellows (particularly so here, with a hip-popping almost 80s faux-goth bassline and a chorus that shares a certain verve with A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’), their little non-Swedish hearts bursting from their chests with longing and naively bittersweet love songs.
Like we said last time, these guys are a band to treasure. Come January, eschew all those gaudy tastemaker lists of “ones to watch” – the band of 2010 is right here.
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