Amity Beach are a five piece indie rock band from Toronto and Grand Bend, Ontario. The blurb on the band’s page at their record label website describes them as, “super-poppy, super-literate and super-awesome” and I can go along with all three descriptions. I suppose a good comparison would be fellow canucks Tokyo Police Club or Born Ruffians, although there are also marked differences which separate Amity Beach as a sound unto themselves.
Back in July they released their debut album, Bonfire Etiquette, on Eternal Bummer Records. The album is a lot of fun, ten slices of reckless indie pop, perfect for summer road trips or get-togethers or whatever (yes I realise am late to the party, you’ll have to wait until next year). Frontman Geoff Baillie says that the album deals with the “carelessness, fear, confusion and spontaneity” of being young.
Preconceptions about this style of music may lead you to expect short sharp songs with simple catchy words, however the lyrics are surprisingly wordy, not verbose but detailed, poetic, something more than a series of shout-a-long choruses. For example, in opener ‘Sunday Nights To Infinity’ Baillie sings:
’With naive melody lamps that decorate the bedroom
We stripped all of the linens tracing a loose thread
If you love me till I’m dead I’ll haunt the bedroom with you
Make ourselves out to be ghosts with sheets around our heads’
The poetic theme continues throughout. The latest single from the album is called ‘Crown Victoria’ (which you can listen to exclusively in the player below), a track which was inspired by Bushfire, a poem by Philip Salom about the Victorian Alpine Fires, a series of bush fires that swept through the state of Victoria, southeast Australia, back in 2003. You can read the poem courtesy of the Australian Poetry Library here.
It is a really interesting direction to take, one that again shows the band are commited to highlighting youth as more than a superficial blend of fun and hormones. There is a depth here, an addressing of the thoughts of the young, the paradoxical concurrence of invincibility and fragility, the ticking of a clock on what appears to be a timeless scene.
’We feel like we are glorious
We drive a Crown Victoria
I’ll be your hands if you’re my eyes
And keep watching the mirrors while I drive
Unless we are stricken in a thickened haze
That’s challenging us to remain
And pressures on to break us down
Now I might be a liar but I’ll say
That we just can’t be defeated’
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/96448088″]
When looking back at our younger years the simplicity of it all is an abiding memory, a lack of commitments or responsibilities that allow for a degree of brashness. Reality, of course, is very different from our rose -tinted memories, and while we were allowed a carelessness or a selfish sense of exploration, the whole gamut of emotions were still present, with fear and confusion prevailing factors, just as Baillie describes in the album. Amity Beach show that representations of youth do not have to be simple.
If you like what you hear then you can get Bonfire Etiquette via the Amity Beach Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-can basis, as well as picking up a physical copy via the merch page.
The band also performed a studio session over at Southern Souls earlier in the year, check it out here.
