If you can’t recognise the pure, bona fide sound of summer when you hear it, you need to clean out your ears. As days grow long and the world blooms anew, fill your boots, be ready to zoot and get in cahoots with the Q-Tip Bandits.
“Sound of summer” is not to say it’s all light, bright, breezy stuff, even as the music lifts you up into the dreamy, faraway blue with its funk, horns and irresistible hipsway. As the album title suggests, summer with these Boston Bandits will be a summer of soul but also uncertainty, of joy AND bittersweet memories.
The sounds and songs are reassuringly “trad” but also real-world contemporary. “Indie Pop” might be the label but there is more to this cool, creative collective than any one bracket or pigeonhole can contain. The song-writing bar is set high, arrangements and performances achieve excellence, simply wonderful at times. In essence, tho, music is all about communication. This is a band who clearly have a lot to say, and now is the time to listen.
Chasing Cars opens the album with the funk to the fore and the quality apparent from the get-go. Next up the Bandits throw you a Lifeline with bassist and singer Claire Davis taking the lead after Leo Son (guitar and vocals) owned the opener, and he’s back for Dan D Lion which is fresh, sprightly yet thoughtful. Wrong Address and the splendid Better Place again feature Claire on lead vocals while the upbeat yet lyrically dense Daisy is all about the interplay between Leo and Claire. Hoyt Parquet on trombone and Maclin Tucker on trumpet are a blessed force throughout and drummer Dakota Maykrantz constantly impresses, not least on Happy, a superior power ballad which reveals more deep thinking – about relationships, two people going in different directions, touching on mental health.
It’s all good, right up to and including the closing Afterglow which, like other, earlier instrumental passages, is experimental and elemental. All in all, a sublime record, full of characters, friendships, ideas, images and emotions.
Melancholy Flowers, by The Q-Tip Bandits, is out on Friday (June 10)