Written by: Dave Cantrell
Drenched in a gently flooded reverb and filled to the brimmermost with pop aspiration, Songs Are Easy by Blue Jeans (AKA ‘the band formerly know as Santa Monica Swim and Dive Club’) is that quintessential summer release that we almost let get past us before, to everyone’s good fortune, it crashed brightly into our ears like a sneaker wave.
Released June 3rd on renowned sunny pop imprint Jigsaw Records out of not-always-so-sunny Ballard WA, it’s an album best served in the accompaniment of transistor radios and cherry sodas in tall glass bottles, its visions of fizzy adolescence (shadowed, naturellement, by all the pop-classic anxieties) shepherded into fruition by main Jean and head songwriter Tim Sendra (ex-Veronica Lake) and producer/fifth member Fred Thomas (Saturday Looks Good To Me), with a nod of acknowledgement and tip of the mastering hat to Black Tambourine/Velocity Girl maestro Archie Moore. The results more-than-satisfy the eyebrow-raising expectations those mentions might have triggered in you cognescenti out there.
Whether it’s “Kara Keeley”‘s irrepressible T.Rexiness that bleeds with a thumping percussive glint into second track “Ratz Revenge,” “Clean Break” with its light-handed Spectorisms – more of a knee-high wall of sound in this case – offering vintage relationship advice with the expected modern twist (it’s voiced by bassist Heather Phares, to give a hint), “Sunscreen”‘s unabashed reaching for the high school heights of lithe young romance and hitting it smack in its sun-glowing bullseye, or the irreverent humor of “Forget That Guy” (you’d better forget that guy/he’s really been in lame bands) that boasts a guileless pluck we think would be the ideal comeback single for the Ramones when they return resurrected and ready to rock, Songs Are Easy has ‘effortless pop artifact’ stamped into its every groove.
While doubt does at times fringe the proceedings here – “False Start” boasts a Rubinoos-like bounce with only half that band’s Beserkely naiveté, its other half filled with a creeping existential weariness, and aching – and invincibly beautiful – closer “I Hit The Board,” Sendra and Phares in lucent, heartworn harmony, dredges a Mariana Trench of melancholia worthy of the Go-Betweens songs it openly quotes (following in the sandy footsteps of other G-B pastiche”Make Up II Make Up” earlier in the tracklist) – even those moments are redeemed by streaks of resilience as deathless and unshakeable as one expects to find inside the depths of a vividly beating teenage heart. Lovingly enveloped by a sound sharp and clear as a million-pixel Polaroid, Songs Are Easy may not make your forever top 40 but it nonetheless suggests, via its own little pop glimmer, that even in a year as fraught as this, summer hope springs eternal. [Songs Are Easy available as a download or CD here]
