Summer’s definitely not what it used to be – at least not in music. I remember the big Brit-pop anthems and rave tunes straight from the clubs of Ibiza hounding the radio airwaves in the nineties. Gosh, those were strange days when my musical palette was no bigger than what was put in front of me on the television or what CD singles (remember those?) my brothers had just bought from HMV and were playing as loudly as they could on their stereos without getting told off by my parents. Now it’s different – a whole lot different. Because I’ve got the internet at hand and a flat where I can blast the music I want as loud as I wish, I can soundtrack my summer however I wish.
Despite the choices at hand, the whole chillwave scene still seems to be lingering, which is okay I suppose (I’ve nothing against the genre really, it does produce some greatly enjoyable music) but there’s only so many summers you want to associate with minimal 80s-inspired music fed through a series of effects pedals. Which is what initially makes Flashlights’ Hidden Behind Trees a refreshing arrival. The Denver two-piece have made their own summer EP which is great and all that, but the main problem is that I find it hard to tell what kind of summer they want to (re)create.
In a nutshell Flashlights make glossy synth pop but there’s little more than that to get your teeth into (imagine Californian band Kisses without any charm). Songs consist of washes of keyboards with accompanying beats that tend to get lost in the mix as singer Ethan Converse’s (a name with so many hipster jokes it almost hurts to have to type it) voice rises high and into beds of reverb. Sometimes this is okay: opening track “Holidays” bounces little synth bubbles back and forth as Converse repeats lines that try to have more meaning than they actually do (“sharp like a bee sting/fast like a camera flash”). But still, the vocal melody (a more spruced up and polished version of Craft Spells’ “For The Ages”) is simple enough to get caught in your head for an afternoon or so. “Apple Trees” trickles in some fiddly calypso melodies and turns out a nice enough closing track for the EP.
But the majority of the time it’s pretty unmemorable stuff lacking in hooks and substance. “Glowing Eyes” tries to build tension with a repeating jagged synth line but instead just lolls about for three and a half minutes. “Canoes” is devastatingly forgettable number that struggles to be made memorable despite its tabla percussion making things a little different. The underwater effects on the keys on “New Hampshire” is enjoyable but the track suffers from a problem that’s present on pretty much every other one in the way the music eventually becomes second place to Converse’s washed-out wailing vocals (think of Placebo’s Brian Molko with more effects). If his lyrics were appealing or even discernible then this tactic would work, but too often the listener just gets something that dissolves into the uninteresting air around it.
Maybe I got off on the wrong foot with the EP. Maybe it’s not a summer EP. But look at that cover – palm trees, birds and reflected light – that’s definitely the cover to a summer record. And the music definitely sounds like it wants to be summery, and occasionally it is, but it’s not quite upbeat nor totally …”chill.” It’s stuck in a strange in-between that I can’t really have imagined any band wanting to explore but, hey, perhaps Hidden Behind Trees is a recollection of a specific kind of summer Flashlights lived through. And good on them for making a product of their memory, but if that’s the case then I’m happy enough with my own summer memories.
