- Craig Scheihing
Beach Slang perform tonight at Analog Café (720 SE Hawthorne) with Lithuania, Worriers, and Beach Party. More details here.
You can be forgiven for wanting to ignore the hype that’s avalanching around Beach Slang. Here’s yet another band out of America’s number-one rock city, Philadelphia, already home to innumerable buzz bands like Hop Along and Kurt Vile and Girlpool—all of whom have received heaps of (well-deserved) praise. But the tenor of the talk around Beach Slang (oof, yet another “Beach” band?) has reached proselytizing proportions. Saviors of rock ‘n’ roll. Throwbacks to punk’s golden age. Blustery, big-hearted tunes from the ultimate survivors.
Spare me, right? But one listen to Beach Slang’s debut album, the 27-minute-long The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us (a title that takes almost as long to say as it does to play the album through), you’ll find yourself agreeing with the evangelists. Its 10 songs are powerful and indelible and painful and honest and undeniably great—cooked from the bones of full-roar punk, but with big chunks of pop heart, singer/songwriter introspection, and booze-soaked, Replacements-y heartache. How did a brand-new band with only two EPs’ worth of experience and a bag of very old tricks arrive at this place of perfection?