We have been following Tallahassee’s Naps for a while now, ever since they sent us their first single, ‘Jeans Skirt Mystique’ in a nice email last summer. Since then they released two more singles, ‘Floral Mattress’ and ‘Sandspurs’, and generally caught the attention of the lo-fi bedroom pop corner of the internet. The really good news is that the band have just released their debut EP, the three singles plus two brand new songs!
The EP opens with ‘Jeans Skirt Mystique’, which, as I said last August, is “like all the best bedroom pop, full of Millennial angst, a sense of resignation and apathy”. The track starts relatively gently, but continues to escalate, eventually slipping into a second gear of ramshackle lo-fi indie rock. Next up is ‘Floral Mattress’ which sees Katryn Macko take over songwriting and singing duties, producing a great indie rock track that has just the right ratio of rocknroll fun and inexpressible sadness.
Then we get the first new track, ‘Ellen Degenerate’, which is probably as raucous and noisy as anything the band have done until now. It’s again angsty and despondent, an ode to the vacuum that exists inside the youth of the twenty first century. Lines such as “I’ve got a black hole where my head should be / can’t pay attention to anything” and “I’ve got a black hole where my heart should be / can’t feel you hanging on to me” communicate the gist of the song pretty clearly, before the song closes with a sharp rejoinder to the commercial, hyper-modern, post-MTV generation of today:
I would hire you to come and run me over with a truck
I would pay my friends to reassure me that they give a fuck
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The opening of ‘Sandspurs’ sees the tempo reduced. Part sweet bedroom pop, part lo-fi rock, the song tells the tale of seeing a former beau with someone else, reminiscing and quizzing the ex-partner in a love-you, hate-you kind of way and spiking with self-assured feeling at all the right moments.
“I remember when you were sweet
pulled the sandspurs out of my feet
now you’re kissing her on my loveseat
so I’ll get drunk and admit defeat”
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The final track, ‘You’re Not the Only Monster From Hell’, is an R.L. Kelly cover, seeing the tempo dropped in favour of the careful monotone of those well-practised in pretending to be unsurprised. This feeds back nicely into the earlier tracks, placing Naps square in the middle of the generation they are singing about, a group caught between an embarrassed aversion to sincerity and the exhausting, empty game of ironic detachment.
You can buy You Will Live in a Cool Box now via the Naps Bandcamp page.