After we sit down, I tell the five members of Surfer Blood, the power pop darlings of CMJ and brewers of much buzz, that I grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida. Schwartz, the drummer, shouts, “No way!” and keyboardist Marcos Marchesani and bassist Brian Black slap their hands against the table.
We find out that we not only went to the same high school, but John Paul Pitts, the lead singer and songwriter, and Schwartz also rode the N43 bus with me to Dreyfoos High School of the Arts.
After five minutes of shaking our heads and playing the name game (“You took band from Mr. Miller?” I ask. “I dated his son!”), we try to understand what it means to make music in the strip-mall-and-highway theme park of Palm Beach County (yes, the same county that botched your 2000 presidential elections). It boasts a population of more than a million, one of the richest ZIP codes in the
U.S. and no independent bookstore to speak of. To compose complex rock in that tropical playground is to perform an opera underwater—few will hear you, and you might drown.
Not that the place is all bad.We went to a school that served as a sanctuary for oddballs and artists, and occasionally, as in the case of Surfer Blood, the contrast between the materialism outside and the spontaneity inside inspired something great.We love to bash our home and, heck, Surfer Blood crafts sophisticated rock because of it, though the band takes issue with what some people think it means.
“We have surf-y elements, but that’s a tiny, tiny percentage,” said Thomas Fickete, the sprightly guitarist. “That’s like calling Joy Division a happy band because it has the word ‘joy’ in it.”
“Yeah,” added Black. “Reviewers call them summer jams and shimmery fun, but in reality, the songs are dark. JP might be singing about the sun, but it sounds like he wants to hang himself from the sun.”
It’s precisely this tension between Florida’s sunshine and the band’s darker tendencies (“The sun is like our worst enemy because we’re so pale,” Pitts says) that makes its debut album Astro Coast’s power chords, catchy melodies and watery reverb more profound than pure pop.The boys don’t like it when reviewers compare their sound to Weezer, instead preferring to measure themselves against dramatic virtuosos such as Sonic Youth and The Pixies.
And why shouldn’t they demand to be taken seriously? Every member of the band studied music through college, though they did it “to keep our parents happy” and have a vendetta against those rigid lessons.
“We all just hated the academic approach to music,” Pitts says, but those years of Mr. Miller’s band class solidified their skills.They understand chord structure and speak through their instruments as if riffs were their mother tongue. In just six months, their musicianship has scored them a fourth U.S. tour and a “best new music” nod from Pitchfork.
“This has been the longest six months of my life,” Marchesani says. “I actually pay attention to what’s going on because something good is happening every day.”
In a city built for five-star vacations, Surfer Blood lived like ragamuffins for years before finalizing the band.While some of our mutual friends worked as waiters to save for Jaguars, these kids piled out of an old Dodge Conversion van after cross-country tours.
Palm Beachers “looked at us like we were crazy,” Pitts says. “They said, ‘what is with you guys? Your van’s falling apart, you play electric guitars and go on tour so that you can come back home with the same amount of money you left with?’” Still, the guys won’t trade their home for Brooklyn.They want to “put South Florida on the map, cheesy as it sounds,” says Black, and they won’t deny that there’s something warm in their songs. Let’s hope that the band keeps undermining the surf as long as it sings about it.
> Surfer Blood
Nov. 13, Brooklyn Bowl, 61 Wythe Ave. (at N. 11th St.), Brooklyn, 718-963-3369; 6, $14
Not since “Jaws” has Surfer Blood been so exciting.
