"Summer"

mp3: Lemonade "Lifted"

Summer has become critical shorthand in the past year for sun-faded tunes that rely on washed out disco beats and nostalgia for teenage drug use. I hate genre designations, but these are . . . sigh . . . your chillwavers, your hypogogic popsters. Actually, hypogogic was a pretty good microgenre title. And despite my gripes with the naming of a (non-existent) genre, the adjective summer really did a fine job of capturing what was going on in these songs. My complaint here, though, is that summer really only captures one specific iteration of the season. Neon Indian is the sound of summer in the suburbs. That heat shimmer throughout the album is the radiation coming off the 7-11 parking lot. The songs are really convincing metaphorical sound: "Deadbeat Summer" sounds like your summers felt.

But now here comes Lemonade to introduce you to literal sound. "Lifted" sounds like, well, a guy yearning on a Caribbean island: steel drums, a little girl's laughter, pool splashes. I can't deny how many times I've listed to this song over the last couple of days. The song is really filled with so many good ideas that come together so nicely that's really a treat to listen to the song, like, a dozen times in a row on 5 separate occasions. Between the irresistible xylophone riff and the steel drum flourishes and the emphatic percussion and the farty synth, the song is just an immensely pleasurable listen. The lyrics are a little cheesy ("I see my whole life come together around you"), but when your musical risks pay off this large you can get away with quite a bit.

Lemonade's new EP Pure Moods comes out 3/9 on True Panther/Matador. Snag it here.