For some reason I wasn't expecting a comeback LP from The Phantom Surfers despite three recent EPs and having seen them live twice at festivals in post-pandemic years. Upon picking up the LP, some might be disappointed that their first LP in decades has taken the route of The Routes, The Krontjong Devils, and other groups by doing a cover album instead of originals. And they might be let down by the seemingly straightforward approach from a band that usually has some stupid scheme in play. But another group of people might be excited to hear how The Phantom Surfers will take on "Ice Ice Baby". Those are the people that will be disappointed. ABBA and other groups on the tracklist will receive about as much in royalties as Dick Dale did on their collaboration album, as these songs share only a title (hence the album name) with the more famous works, and are otherwise completely different. Which explains why some of these song titles are actually movie or book titles. So there's your gag: a piss-take on cover albums and perhaps also the perfunctory practice of naming surf songs.
Another group of people that might be disappointed are devotees to their first three albums that expect The Phantom Surfers to sound like shit. No, sir, these sound like trash, there's a difference! I've raved about Shorty Poole's mastery of capturing surf sound, and this is perhaps his most laudable, as he somehow managed to make them sound even better than their good-sounding later albums, while still retaining their rusty, heavy-handed style. On one hand this is The Phantom Surfers as you've never heard them before, but I wouldn't dare call it "glossy" or "slick". Nor should it be!
Also as one expects from The Phantom Surfers, these are dead simple melodies, about as devoid of pretension as they get. The closest they get to shaking things up is some triangle in "Ice Ice Baby" and steel guitar in "(The Pina Colada Song)". I got a big kick out of "Getting to Solla Sollew" where every note seems to be played as if trying to break a string. "Ulysses" features such a nastily square-wavey fuzztone that it almost sounds 8-bit. And "Mrs. Robinson" is either exprimental or just drunk. But of course the meat of this is surfy surf songs, which crash delightfully, like "In Cold Blood", "Ramblin' Rose", "Death of a Salesman", or others. And it's 100% instrumental too!
The Phantom Surfers may have downplayed their comeback record by making its entire presentation a farce, but I think otherwise this was exactly what you'd want. They kept things low-stakes, they doubled down on what they're good at, and while they're not really taking big enough swings to pull at your heartstrings or whatever, this is a pretty pure version of the brand of surf that people love them for.
Hi-Tide's got purple vinyl and CDs, bandcamp's got digital.
