Cool Breeze Over the Mountains by Spaceships (review)

Back in 2014, I wrote about a dozen record reviews for a website called Buzz and Howl. It was later hacked and disappeared into the ether. This is one in a series of posts intended to preserve that work, unedited. 

Spaceships, Cool Breeze Over the Mountains 

“We play bedroom-garage style rock and roll for the kids,” proclaims the Bandcamp page of L.A. boy/girl duo Spaceships and--despite its seeming simplicity and the generally insipid nature of most band-related copy--quite a lot about their approach is revealed in this short statement. There is a knowing wink being tossed out by the phrase “bedroom-garage” that shows Jessie Waite and Kevin LaRose have a wry relationship with rock history. Garage rock, which is unmistakably what they play, was named for a somewhat derogatory term for the type of band that originally played it--“garage bands”--who were in turn named for the actual location where it was played. The idea being, of course, that a garage band practiced in the garage and was probably never going to play outside of the garage. Spaceships call their music “bedroom-garage” because they play garage rock, but they play it in a bedroom--or at least in an apartment.

I’m sure they’re also well-aware that the term “bedroom” itself has been applied to a certain mopey style of whispered indie music. And this ain’t that. Jessie Waite’s guitar turns out churning riffs. Her nasally vocals mostly map the limited terrain between cheerfully snotty and snottily cheerful; either way they’re pushed with a ton of gain and occasionally distorting out of intelligibility. That’s where the phrase “for the kids” from that brief descriptive statement (that the band almost certainly wrote for themselves) comes in. The vocals can be childlike, and when the melodies and lyrical themes seem to match that mood and tone, that’s when Spaceships first full-length Cool Breeze Over the Mountains is at its best. “I had a dream, I had a wand like magic/I was so rich and pretty…” goes the infectious opening verse of “Dreams.” I’m less taken with the duo’s attempts at sludgy metal riffs, like “Cowboy Beach” or “Snow Mountain,” but to be fair they do evoke a different sort of childhood experience. Instead of the jumping-on-the-bed rowdy cheerfulness found elsewhere on the album, we get bad kid sulking, the supposed power of the big riffs actually evoking a certain impotence. “Don’t tell me I’m bad, when I’m not bad,” Waite repeats on “Snow Mountain.” “Don’t tell me I’m wrong, when I’m not wrong.”

The compositions on Cool Breeze... are sometimes afflicted with that problem where the intros are weird, or catchy and fun--and way more interesting than the tune the song settles into. Back-to-back mid-album tracks “Ghost” and “Gandalf” are both like that. The title track has a different problem. It begins with, and uses as its chorus, a surf-rock riff so familiar I couldn’t help but conjuring regional TV commercials for a nearby boardwalk from my youth. It sounds great, and it’s not even the most catchy thing about the song, the verses of which are like a sing-songy schoolyard chant you can’t quite get out of your head.

This is a danger for a band working in what is, after all, a somewhat retro idiom. But it’s also a strength. Because here I am blasting “Cool Breeze Over the Mountains” again, awash in yet another shade of childhood: those long summer afternoons spent watching TV, wishing you could get away to anywhere else, have some real fun like the kids running from the waves and walking the beach boardwalk in the commercial.