Coast Red – Swim
Similar artists: The Vaccines, Cage The Elephant, Green Day, Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes
Genre: Surf Rock, Pop Rock, Garage Rock
The fact is that ordinary life is bound to be burdened by terrible tragedies and blessed also by wonderful events. The fact that they’ll happen shouldn’t come as a surprise. Ultimately, it will come down to the way that the people to whom these happen look upon life, which will determine whether the road led them to where they wished to be going.
Cheerful, clever pop-rock artists reflect a kind of easy-going optimism that many of us wish we possessed. The people who make this music seem to be helped by an instinct to laugh off problems and to jump for joy. Instinctively, we all know that this is the best way to get by, but there are few of us who actually live this way.
Coast Red’s “Swim” is a marvellously cheerful tune, even when it is describing potentially terrible things. This is because, in large part, the band members have a teenager-like attitude toward life, and that shouldn’t wear off with time. Just like The Vaccines or Cage the Elephant, bands that they are clearly influenced by, Coast Red have a lightness to their touch that should carry them far in life and, perhaps, in music also.
Tractor Beam – Set In Stone
Genre: Indie Rock
Modern musicians are often great trendchasers. They put themselves under incredible strain while trying to acquire knowledge of what’s hot and what’s not. And, as soon as they learn everything that they want to know, the trend is over. It doesn’t even help them stand out to simply go fishing for whatever somebody else is doing.
The best strategy, perhaps, is to learn enough of what your musical competitors are doing and then purposely do something that stands as a direct contradiction of their principles. It may not be appreciated. It might not get people to fall in love with it. But, unless people have put their senses to sleep, it should get them noticed.
Tractor Beam’s “Set In Stone” takes many indie-rock cliches and turns them inside-out with an innocent, matter-of-factly, naive sound that ends up being hard to compare to anything else. It sounds small, lo-fi and designed to get audiences having to lean in to understand what’s going on. A lot of other bands would’ve put a leather jacket and shades on this and would’ve made it cooler. Tractor Beam, however, opt to stand out.
