San Francisco-based indie-pop duo Acid Ghost (comprised of Ace Barcelon and Mikey Mendoza) only began putting out music at the beginning of the year, releasing their first single ‘All Alone‘ in January, followed by the 5-Song EP Ghosts & Rotten Love back in April. Last week the band released Vacation, their debut full-length album.
Vacation starts off sounding like a back alley brawl; a rumbling, rolling, guitar-bending riot of reverb, but ‘We Hate Indie Music’ is a discordant, albeit cool, intro song to an otherwise mellow and dreamy album which is lyrically laden with canned-romance and evokes the things a bummer summer is made of: sticky, melted ice cream, a week-old sunburn and sand stuck between your toes.
‘Someone Else’ is a fantastic, fuzzed out beach-pop tune, full of backing harmonies and a rhythm that begs the listener to clap along. Lyrically, the track is a classic jilted lover, heartache ballad delivered with a dejected but oh-so-over-it-already tone that captures the garage rock aesthetic so perfectly.
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‘When the Sun Rises’ is sure to please fans of dream pop acts Craft Spells and Wild Nothing with its soft, echoing guitars, bouncing beat and million-miles-away vocals, while ‘Stargazers’, a personal favorite, is heavy with distortion and sounds like a cover of the best song The Jesus and Mary Chain never wrote. The album’s eponymous track, ‘Vacation’, a slow, rocking alt tune, embodies the sweetly blasé mood that carries the cohesive thread through the album. Barcelon sings the lyric “slow the time down, times too fast now, cause I’m having fun” as though he’s never been more bored in his life.
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Acid Ghost’s Bandcamp info simply says “This is all for fun.” and fun is precisely what Vacation is – an album that doesn’t sound like it takes itself too seriously, doesn’t seem to strive for radio-pop perfection. Some songs end abruptly and others just wander away, as if the band decided “that’s good enough” and moved on. Vacation comes across as an album made by a couple of guys who just wanted to record fun songs that sound good and leave it at that.
You can pick Vacation up on a pay-what-you-want basis over at Acid Ghost’s Bandcamp.