Throughout its discography, Summer Salt has consistently chased and succeeded to capture a feeling: the feeling of cruising along a curved road on a warm summer day, sun-soaked air tossing your hair in every direction. Or the feeling of laying on a sandy beach on the warmest afternoon of the year, floating in the balance between a blanket of hot sand and a wide, blue sky.
The Austin-based trio has delivered once again on Campanita, its new 41-minute record with soft, catchy melodies, breezy guitar chords, and indie surf rock-inspired grooves that provide a warm background to even sunnier lyrics.
Summer Salt—consisting of regulars Matthew Terry, Eugene Chung, and guest Anthony Barnett—provides its most cohesive album yet, with the first tracks of the record setting the tone for what’s to come. On “Campanita”, “Tortilla Soup”, and “Supermoon”, the band easily blends its easy-going indie rock percussions and impressively catchy hooks—something they’ve played with but never fully developed on previous records.
Most of the sentiments on Campanita aren’t too complex, but that’s okay. You get the feeling, listening to the lyrics, that Summer Salt is able to do more with less, with simple hooks and choruses that feel as if they came with the instrumental, the two coming together so effortlessly to give each song a distinct vibe using the strong writing abilities of all three band members.
These first few tracks comes off as insouciant, with lyrics so easy to listen to they verge on falling back on clichés, such as on fourth track Macaroon, with lines such as “Can I love you only and lend you money, and name my girl after you?” and “It’s strange all that love can do, cause I’d give it all through and through.”
The majority of the songs in the first half of the album have catchy, loud hooks that conjure images of drinks with mini umbrellas and the feeling of a beach towel after a full day’s use. Catchy? Yes. Substance? Lacking.
But the album plays well front-to-back, with fifth track “Fire Sign” providing a lulling, ambient instrumental-only bridge to the second half of the album, which provides some much needed respite from the high volume opening tracks.
Most of the songs on Campanita steer far from introspection or dazzling lyricism, but some moments in the second half of the album show the trio capturing more down-to-earth, art-pop-esque vignettes through articulate descriptors. Case in point: the quiet, moody track Indigo, which feels more like spoken word poetry crooned under the moonlight hours after the sun has set: “Indigo, blossom in blue bell, in time. We never noticed them once, ’til we got older.”
The band closes off with “Sana”, “Back to,” and “Gotta Go to Know,” three nostalgic, slow songs that take their time, sonically spiraling from the soft feeling of a sandy beach toward a feeling of floating on a warm cloud in the middle of a blue sky, leaving listeners to feel like we just spent a year in the summer.
It’s hard to imagine that Summer Salt wrote this album outside of any environment that lacked a sandy beach or extensive lounging under the sun. An album that begins with a few loud, pop-cliche-full songs gives way to an introspective project that casually reveals the maturity of a band that has slowly grown and developed their skills.
On the final track “Gotta Go to Know,” lead singer Terry sings “Somewhere on a morning paper route, I’m drinking coffee, or in the ballet now. With ruby wings, nebulas of jade, just always know I’ll be around.”
Knowing Summer Salt, they will continue doing what they do best: making nostalgic tracks that remind us of beach days despite the time of year. Whether that morning paper route is seasonal or year-round, this record makes a compelling case that it doesn’t matter, because summer is so much more than just a season.
The Stumptown Groove 