Sea Girls - Open Up Your Head (2020) [Official Digital Download 24/88]

The fast-rising British indie band may be completely unoriginal, but big melodies and easy charm shine through songs about the wistful end of adolescence.

Of all the teenage rites of passage the pandemic has put a stop to (spontaneous snogging, hanging round shopping centres unmasked, going to school), the sweat-sodden, full-body experience of the moshpit seems the most likely to be among adolescence’s permanent losses. Rowdy crowds are a fixture of teen-heavy gigs, from rap to EDM to hyper-polished pop. For a band like Sea Girls, the impact would be especially acute. Having constructed a reputation from years of energetic live shows, the four-piece now make the kind of instantly familiar, big-chorused, gnarly-guitared indie designed to facilitate catharsis and connection on a mass scale. In other words, their music is machine-tooled to get the pit pumping.

While they wait for a post-Covid world, Sea Girls (a double misnomer: they’re a group of lads who mainly hail from landlocked Leicestershire, the name taken from a misheard Nick Cave lyric) must rely on the headphone appeal of their meat-and-two-veg rock. To describe their style as overwhelmingly generic isn’t so much a criticism as an indisputable fact – if you try hard enough, you can hear pretty much every guitar band from the last 40 years in their debut, from Mumford and Sons to the Cure, the 1975 to Echo and the Bunnymen. There are post-punk revival riffs, plaintive Britpop-style singalongs, glittery synths beloved of the Killers, shades of grunge and U2-level bellowing – often all in a single song. On Do You Really Wanna Know? it’s even possible to detect strains of the kind of 90s novelty rock practised by Barenaked Ladies.

TRACKLIST

1. Sea Girls - Transplant
2. Sea Girls - All I Want To Hear You Say (Single Version)
3. Sea Girls - Do You Really Wanna Know?
4. Sea Girls - Lie To Me
5. Sea Girls - Call Me Out
6. Sea Girls - Closer
7. Sea Girls - Forever
8. Sea Girls - Weight In Gold
9. Sea Girls - Ready For More
10. Sea Girls - Violet
11. Sea Girls - Shake
12. Sea Girls - Damage Done
13. Sea Girls - You Over Anyone
14. Sea Girls - Moving On



Thanks to the Original customer.