Labels: Moshi Moshi
Review by: Andy Malcolm
I think I downloaded a song by this lot (I say lot, there’s only 2 of the buggers), which must have led me to ordering it a while back, but I honestly can’t remember hearing that song or even ordering it, so booze was no doubt involved. Listening to the title track here, I can safely say that was the case, I probably heard it, thought “this sounds a bit like Wild Nothing” and in the haze completely overlooked the more annoying features of the song. Summer Camp are most definitely harkening back to a similar era of pop music as Wild Nothing, that being the early 80s. This is all about chilly, bedroom based electro pop vibes but they’ve kind of bludgeoned a fair amount of the pleasure out of it with some synths that fade in and out in an irritating fashion, making the record sound warped. However, the chorus is dead nice, and in fact, when that annoying sound isn’t present, it’s pretty listenable. Maybe I just listened to 10 second snips of the song somewhere and decided “Good enough for me!”. Hrumph. Flip it for “It’s Summer”, clearly they’ve missed their target release date by some margin here. Maybe that’s why it’s the b-side. Again they’ve pitched themselves in the early 80s, with heavy doses of synths, drum machines and other electro sounds and the kind of production that you might pluck from that period if you were kind of in awe of it but not actually alive at the time. I am pretty sure that the people in this band are not in their mid 30s anyway. Can you be nostalgic about something you never experienced? So it all comes off a bit wonky. Anyway, this is pop music, and I’m afraid it doesn’t really work. Yep, I am concluding that this isn’t much cop at all, why did I buy this thing?