The harder it is to find search results after Googling a band's name, the cooler they are. The more difficult to come across, the more exclusive they appear. Take for example similar artists Beach House or Tennis. According to this scale, Summer Camp is indeed a moderately hip band, and that may just be how Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley want it.
Laying low following the initial praise of their EP, they may now find the indie limelight unavoidable after the release of their first full-length LP
Welcome To Condale, released November 8.
That being said, we've been big on Summer Camp all year. At SXSW 2011, the duo played an impressive line up, complete with projections of a never-ending set of lost family photos. As Christiana explained in her
Young EP review, the band was birthed from the happenstance of a mixtape.
After the seemingly effortless success of their EP last year, the duo took a step back and better defined the project, producing a simply great album that captures the nostalgia of preppy 80s pop while matching it with the attitude of modern apathy.
The first single "Down" is undeniably catchy, and is accompanied by a fantastic Halloween party themed
video. Songs like "I Want You" and "Done Forever" present an unassuming yet sneakingly infectious dance beat. Reproducing some of the tracks from the EP, the penultimate track "Ghost Train" still remains a stand out.
The final song, "1988," seeks to mark a deceptive time stamp on the album, and in a lot of ways thats the reason I liked it so much. It sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a John Hughes film, or at the very least some new age teen rom-com with one of the
Superbad kids. Much like its namesake, Summer Camp's
Welcome To Condale is just genuinely fun.