Album Review : Antarctica Takes It! - Constellations
- Written by Muso's Guide
Summer may have already bolted the stable, but it doesn't seem to matter to Dylan McKeever, whose frosty solo-plus-friends project Antarctica Takes It! have been lashing out the sunshine pop for a number of years now, belying their moniker and charming the few who seem to care enough to listen.
It has been a murky four years since debut effort The Penguin League made its way off McKeever's laptop on which it was recorded and into the hearts of the minorities, but, through funding drives and a tiny bit of improvements in the recording process ("we used a microphone" Dylan mentioned in a blog post recently), Constellations is well worth the wait. From lead track 'C&F' through, its infectious rhythm and incessant joyfulness drive the record to the sweet climax of closing track 'Bedrooms', stopping off for some boy-girl vocal harmonies and an overabundance of ukulele usage.
But for those aware of the joys of his debut effort, McKeever’s follow-up is a love it or hate it experience. A lot of the charm of The Penguin League came from its rough edges coupled with sweet melodies. Recorded directly to a laptop (as in using the laptop’s onboard microphone), it was more than a little raw, but with the undoubted delightfulness of tracks like ‘Circuits’ and ‘The Song is You’, the roughness of the recording only added to its allure. Constellations has a much richer polish to it, which, whilst bringing out the sunshine of the tracks, inevitably eliminates part of the charm that made the first record so appealing.
With that though, the polish brings the colour in McKeever’s songwriting to the fore. The gorgeous ‘Try, Try, Try’ has a nod and a wink to 60s Girl Pop, elsewhere, ‘Voices’ is typical of ukulele-led music coming from the US by the likes of Dent May and ‘Spirit of Love’ is so slushy it’s almost cringeworthy, if it wasn’t for a severe love of bombastic sunshine pop music.
But for the doubters, clocking in at a little under forty minutes, the album probably crosses the line of short, sharp guilty pleasure and firmly in the record to avoid camp. For those of us who always have sunshine in our hearts, Constellations is a perfect injection to get us through the winter.