Skaters - Manhattan (2014) [Gorgatz]

Skaters - Manhattan (2014) [Gorgatz]



- I N F O -

Every ten years or so a band or artist comes out of New York to remind the world that the city is unequivocally the centre of the universe. Bob Dylan sang out of the Greenwich Village café in the 60s, Lou Reed drawled from the CBGBs stage in the 70s and The Strokes drew eyes to the Big Apple once again in the 00s. Skaters continue this lineage with a debut album that encapsulates the excitement and romanticism of the Big Apple’s wild side of graffitied subways and sticky-floored pizza places.

Comprising of members of noughties nearly-men from either side of the pond (The Paddingtons and The Dead Trees), Skaters take the sound of the “New Rock Revolution” of that time and drag it into the present decade. Buzzsaw guitars reminiscent of The Strokes and anthemic choruses that bring to mind The Walkmen are ever present, but ‘Manhattan’ is also peppered with Calypso cuts and Afro beats courtesy of tracks ‘Bandbreaker’ and ‘Fear of The Knife’, bringing a more cerebral Vampire Weekend influence to the party.

If ‘Manhattan’ was a party, it would be a house party in an Upper Westside tenement: college girls dancing carelessly, junkies passed out in the kitchen and Skaters sizing everyone up while waiting for the pizza to arrive. Anyone who has seen Skaters live will know they look like the stylish scumbags who populate the films of Larry Clark. And that malevolence hidden amongst irresistible pop hooks is key to the magnetism of the band.

Early single ‘Schemers’ thankfully makes an appearance on the album. The thrilling combination of witty lyrics, pop melody and effortless cool captures Skaters at their most potent but thankfully the 2012 single is only the tip of the iceberg. Opener ‘One of Us’ maybe too similar to a track from ‘Is This It’ to be a highlight but it sets the mood perfectly. Both ‘Miss Teen Massachusetts’ and lead single ‘Deadbolt’ are indie disco classics in waiting with Michael Ian Cummings’ reverb-soaked acerbic brogue fuzzing over Josh Hubbard’s relentless garage rock riffs. Each song on ‘Manhattan’ has a chorus that lodges itself in your brain without apology. Energy from the frustration of Skaters members’ stunted careers in previous bands clearly propels this record.

None of Skaters skate, instead the name is a nod to youth and all its fun and lack of worry. The album is relentlessly upbeat and energising. This is most evident in last year’s single ‘I Wanna Dance (But I Don’t Know How)’. But there is much more here than carefree optimism and cool baseball caps. Skaters may not be able to skate, nor dance, but they do make thrilling indie rock. New York will proud.

Last week, the Village Voice published its list of the 50 Most NYC Albums Ever, a feature that illustrated the myriad ways—from West Side Story to Ramones to On the 6—in which the five boroughs have been mythologized in song over the past 60-odd years. Coincidentally enough, just days later, New York quartet Skaters issued their own listicle of Big Apple rock-history signifiers—they just happened to do it in the form of their debut record.

It’s an album about living in Manhattan titled Manhattan. There’s a song about what it’s like to be young in NYC called “To Be Young in NYC”. There are between-song snippets of young women complaining about sublets in uncannily Shosh-like voices. And it's no exaggeration to say this album—and its major-label patronage—would not exist without the modernized grot-rock of the Strokes’ Is This It. But in contrast to that unimpeachable document of pre-9/11, Giuliani-era jollies, Manhattan is the rock‘n’roll analogue to a post-Bloomberg New York, where skyrocketing rents—and the big-box chains that can afford them—can make some city blocks look like Anytown USA. If the Strokes savvily refashioned NYC iconoclasts like the Velvet Underground and Television as dance-party pop music, Manhattan is what’s become of your head-shop CBGB t-shirt after another 12 years of laundromat visits.

Each of the 11 songs here are positioned at some point in an endless cycle of going out, scoping girls, getting drunk, making out, passing out, and “waking up in [your] clothes.” But for Skaters, such scenes are apparently so routine that they often sound disinterested in their own debauchery: On the opening track, “One of Us”, frontman Michael Ian Cummings sums up another messy night on the town by blithely repeating the words “fun and games” with an audible shrug that suggests he’d rather be at home catching up on House of Cards. It’s a blasé attitude that’s reflected in the band’s intensely streamlined sound, which retains the fuzz and buzz of post-millennial mainstream garage-rock, but is synth-smoothed and rhythmically processed to the point of sterlity. And the dabbles with electro blips (“I Wanna Dance But I Don't Know How”) and half-baked hardcore (“Nice Hat”) ultimately dilute rather than diversify the band’s personality; you’ll hear more credible reggae than “Bandbreaker” in your local karaoke bar’s backing track for “Underneath It All.”

But if Skaters' version of Manhattan feels overly insular and one-dimensional, they at least come by it honestly: Upon arriving from L.A. in 2012, Cummings reportedly spent his first year in New York working as a bartender, giving him a nightly front-row seat to a parade of self-indulgence. And in his more inspired moments, he evinces the smarm and charm (if not the knockout lyricism) of another guy who's seen his fair share of last calls, Paul Westerberg. Really, if the reunited Replacements decided to make a new record in 2014, they could do worse than crank out new-waved power-pop pick-me-ups like “Schemers” or the aforementioned “To Be Young in NYC”, whose shout-out to “a generation of jerks, directionless on our feet” scans as a post-millennial update of “Bastards of Young.”

“To Be Young in NYC” is the song dedicated to an unattainable rival-state beauty that, ironically, best fulfills Manhattan’s soundtrack-to-the-city mission: “Miss Teen Massachusetts”, which boasts the album's most towering hook and convincingly restless performance. It just goes to show that it takes a lot more to capture the spirit of New York City in song than sampling conversations with cab drivers or rhyming “Harlem” with “problem”; with its churning groove and pleading, stressed-out vocal, “Miss Teen Massachusetts” counts as the rare moment where Skaters seem less concerned about describing what life in Manhattan looks and sounds like, and more into communicating how it really feels.

- T R A C K L I S T -

01. One of Us
02. Miss Teen Massachusetts
03. Deadbolt
04. Band Breaker
05. To Be Young In NYC
06. Schemers
07. Symptomatic
08. Fear of the Knife
09. I Wanna Dance (But I Don't Know How)
10. Nice Hat
11. This Much I Care

Format: mp3, CBR 320 kbps
Genre: Alternative, Garage Rock
Size: 78.13 MB