CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: LA COSTA PERDIDA (2013)
1) Come Down The Coast; 2) Too
High For The Love-In; 3) You Got To Roll; 4) Someday Our Love Will Sell Us Out;
5) Peaches In The Summertime; 6) Northern California Girls; 7) Summer Days; 8)
La Costa Perdida; 9) Aged In Wood; 10) A Love For All Time.
If you like your Camper Van Beethoven slow,
serious, nostalgic, melancholic, and soulful, this one's for you. Now that the
band members are in their fifties, chances of them reigniting the old hooligan
spirit are fairly low — but it is almost as if they are consciously accelerating
the maturation-aging process. Like New
Roman Times, La Costa Perdida is
another conceptual suite, but this time, it has nothing whatsoever to do with
politics: most of the record reads like a symbolic love letter to their native
California, soaked in nostalgia for the old days — you know, when la costa was not yet quite perdida, so to speak. The band members
themselves stated that their chief influence for the record was Holland by The Beach Boys, an album
whose serene, naturalistic spirit does have something in common with what they
are trying to do here. Whether they succeed in this is a different matter:
most of the critics who still remembered CvB from the old days resorted to
comparisons with Key Lime Pie, the
most serious, thoughtful, and potentially boring release that they had in those
old days. And these comparisons weren't always friendly.
To be perfectly honest, I like the idea and
respect the attempt, but the album does bore me. It is really slow-moving
(except for ʽPeaches In The Summertimeʼ, played at such a ridiculously frantic
tempo that it sounds like they are seriously trying to compensate with just
this one track for all the slowness around), really monotonous (introspective,
brooding nostalgia permeates all the vocal and instrumental parts), and not too
big on catchy hooks. Throw in the fact that Lowery is quite far from the most
hypnotic performer when it comes to wearing your intellectual heart on your
college suit sleeve, and what you get is something that works much better in theory
than on practice — much like Key Lime
Pie.
It is easy to illustrate on the example of the
very first track, the country-rock waltz ʽCome Down The Coastʼ. Lisher's lead
lines are colorful and sweet, Lowery's sentimental lyrics are delivered
sincerely and friendly, but nothing ever rises above «adequate» — and when they
get to the repetitive "come down and see me sometime" chorus, it
quickly becomes too predictable and boring: how many times can you chant
"[Insert four-syllable-long girl name here], come down and see me
sometime" before you begin to sound like an obsessed whiner? And, needless
to say, the backing harmonies are quite a far cry from the Beach Boys.
Word-wise, Lowery may be getting his point across (all things may come and go,
but girls and the sea shore will be here for ever), but atmosphere-wise, the
song does not make much of an impression.
The same judgement, I guess, gets extrapolated
over everything else here. ʽToo High For The Love-Inʼ does have a lovely set of
female vocals reminiscent of certain strands of lush Europop from the Sixties,
and a few pretty guitar flourishes to boot, but still overstays its welcome.
The psycho-blues anthem ʽSomeday Our Love Will Sell Us Outʼ rides the same
stiff groove for five minutes, briefly plunging it into pools of chaos during
the coda, but its potentially mesmerizing mix of slide guitars, violins, and
sitars is really so simplistic and repetitive that no true magic comes out of
it. And the album's alleged centerpiece, ʽNorthern California Girlsʼ, takes on
ʽHey Judeʼ-ian proportions, slipping into an anthemic coda whose two most
notable features are: a distorted psychedelic lead guitar part, sounding
exactly like a million distorted psychedelic solos before it, and a choral
chant of "Northern Califor-nia girls, Northern Califor-nia girls" by
a pack of hypnotized zombies who have long ago forgotten the meaning of that
noun phrase but have been cursed to go on chanting it forever because they do
not deserve any better. At least, you know, the da-da-da part on ʽHey Judeʼ was
delivered with some genuine excitement.
In short, I am touched by Lowery and Co.'s
feelings for their homeland, and I'm pretty sure the record will have a special
appeal for all those who also happened to grow up between Stinson Beach and
Arcata in the Sixties and Seventies (and maybe even later), seagulls included.
But in terms of a more universal appeal, this is no Holland, and there's way too much subordination of the music to the
concept. "We're old tigers / Sleeping in the sun / Dreaming of the
hunt", Lowery sings on ʽSummer Daysʼ, and I guess this is really what the
whole thing is about. Except that some old tigers still manage to have more
vivid dreams than others, and this particular batch of old tigers sounds like
it at least needs a bit more vitamins to hold your attention.
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ReplyDeleteHaving biked the West Coast of the U.S. extensively, I can confirm that trying to do musical justice to the stretch "between Stinson Beach and Arcata" is bound to get any artist in trouble.
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