The Daily Spin, November 1
Bahamas | Barchords
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Barchords (2012)
Artist: Bahamas
Link:
Sleepy Californian surf rock meets male crooner energy on Barchords, former Feist guitarist Afie Jurvanen’s second-full length release.
It’s a weird pick for this time of year in Minnesota - as I write this, it’s all of thirty degrees, and this is music that very much befits a beach trip in my head, with reverberating guitars and a sort of echoey sentiment that very much feels like it needs the crashing waves to hold its shape - and it’s really hard to give surf rock the surf part of that feeling when the water is frozen - but I think one of my favorite things about this album is the versatility I feel with it.
This has and will always be one of the albums I most strongly associate with “winter” in California, the times when the ocean gets a little cold to be wading into, when I would go to the beach with a hoodie and sweats to watch the water roll in and clear my head a bit, and from that perspective it’s a tremendous offering.
The clear strongest track is the opener, ‘Lost in the Light’, a wrenching little tune about heartbreak, the likes of which the rest of the album tries to reach again, with little success. Look at this compared to Punisher, which we looked at yesterday, and the gap is stark - similar highs, if you ask me, but Bridgers fills through the rest of the album with similarly driving stories, while Jurvanen is content to attempt to play his best John Mayer impression through his bluesy-rock influence instrumental dances. Though he does an alright job of it, it’s also clearly an imitation, and that’s a hard reputation to shake.
Rating: 8.1/10
Best Tracks: Lost In The Light; Never Again
Worst Tracks: Montreal