Monthly Challenge Super Go!

June’s album is Last Summer Effect by Last Summer Effect. This album feels a bit like a cheat, but it is an album that came out last month, and I did have it on heavy rotation for the rest of the month because I liked it. The reason it feels like a cheat is that one of our freelancer’s at work is a sound engineer and worked on it, and the reason I even heard this album is that he dropped the Spotify link in our team group chat the day it came out with a plea to share it about/give it a listen. (By his own admittance they were the band he was in at eighteen, so he might even be playing on it too.) So I stuck it on in the background while making brunch after a night in the pub, to do a colleague a solid on the stats front and ended up really liking the vibe.

It’s kinda…It’s kind of an emo album I think. A bit Hundred Reasons I think, all crunchy guitars and soulful emoting singing. It’s not really my taste in music any more, but twenty years ago it would have been absolutely my jam and I’d have loved this album. (This album came out last month, but the only reason it couldn’t have come out twenty years ago is that the band would have barely been in double digits at that point, but my point stands, it should have come out on Chemical Underground some time between 2005 and 2009 - which is not far off given that the band were officially together between 2010 and 2013!) It feels like stumbling across an album released by a tiny band I saw at a gig when I was twenty, that I saw twice, followed on MySpace and bought a hand-burned EP off the band at the back of the gig. If one of those bands had miraculously got hold of some decent production values, the harmonies and production are pretty lush - Steve does know what he’s about. It sounds like sunny hungover mornings in friends flats after gigs, or big nights out. (The smell of stale sweat, flat beer and other people’s dead cigarettes hanging in the air.) I’m really not sure if there’s actually a market for this that isn’t millennial nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it if they weren’t friends of friends, but that could go for a great number of bands I listened to from that actual period of time too. I keep putting it on to listen to while I do other things so nostalgia or not, so clearly present day me rather likes it too.