Album Review: Beach Fossils - Beach Fossils

That this band has fallen on Beach Fossils as a name is presumably not an accident – from Wavves and Beach House, you can join the dots. Then there’s the sun-bleached, salt-licked holiday feel, with sand finding its way into every nook, even adding an unwanted crunch to your sandwich. Just check the track listing: ‘Vacation’, ‘Lazy Day’, ‘Daydream’. But also, it’s also a nod to an ancient world, as far as the current rate of development goes – not so much a forgotten time, more one that just keeps on getting dug up.

Here, if not quite dating back to the Jurassic era, it’s the production values presented in the Nuggets compilations that once more get faithfully recreated, while the spirit that went on to inspire the punk movement is largely overlooked. You might catch the odd jangle of the Jesus and Mary Chain, maybe a flash of Johnny Marr or the drippy, floaty weightlessness that characterised the C86 movement, but all of that can be traced back to the same point. It seems that no matter what people are currently plugging their ears into, there will always be someone somewhere still stuck in a suburban American garage in the mid- to late-1960s. Only the first time round, those bands held an ambition to get out of the garage.

It’s a history lesson that could be as enthralling as watching paint dry – as the album cover tries to capture – but New York’s Beach Fossils at least turn this potentially drab job into something meditative. You won’t need to think too much to get buried in the album’s simple, warm embrace, but equally there’s nothing to keep you there for the long-term.

The band plays it by numbers and get out of this exactly what you would imagine they intended – nothing more, which might miss the point. Looping guitars and vocal swoop around and glide past without ever lingering long enough to be properly clasped. And at the back of your head, you’re thinking that it would’ve been nice to learn something about the people that made this album, what makes them tick, and not just what they want to reveal of their record collection.

This is a record that’s difficult to get excited about and even harder to remember once it’s over. But while it’s on, it’s easy to drift along with it, lost to rose-tinted nostalgia for a time and a place where you never were.

In a word: coasting.