Black Wine - Summer of Indifference

Black Wine are often listed as everyone's favorite band featuring a member from The Ergs. I mean, I definitely understand this assertion...but I can't even begin to pick sides with this. There's just too many post-Ergs bands that are/were awesome. There's House Boat, Short Attention, The Dopamines (for a while), Night Birds, The Measure (for a while), Psyched to Die, that one thing Mikey did with her girlfriend at the time or whatever, Mikey's solo stuff, that New Low band with Jon Weiner will probably be awesome, and there's definitely more that I'm not thinking of. Oh yeah, Star Fucking Hipsters.

That being said, Black Wine are definitely one of the best post-Ergs bands. They have this garage-rock sound fused with pop punk and indie elements. To me it's like if Foo Fighters had a band baby with Lemuria.  They just released The Summer of Indifference and it's a pretty awesome album. The instrumentals sound really grungy and muddy, and the vocal melodies are very singalongable. Okay, the further you get into an album, it seems like the baby was made by three bands, with the third band being Descendents or Bad Religion or someone else out of the 80s. I'm saying this due to the song "Favorites". Listen to it, and you'll probably agree. It's definitely one of the better songs on this album too.

Okay, this album definitely gets better with every song. "Ocean's Skin" is just an awesome song. This band doesn't let any sort of genre define their musical actions, and this song is a perfect example of that. It has a beach atmosphere with a folky vocal tone to it. Then it's topped off with a guitar solo that reminds me a lot of Kudrow and Shinobu. I love this song, dudes. It's perfect. Of course this song is followed by an extremely different sounding, yet equally awesome, song. I fucking love this album.

Jeff has definitely come a lot way as far as vocals and songwriting goes. I didn't really like his Ergs songs very much; I deleted Fishbulb off of Dorkrockcorkrod whenever I put it on my computer. The progress in songwriting could possibly be attributed to the other members of Black Wine, Miranda and Jason. This band has a lot going on, and it's definitely something everyone should give a try. I think it might be impossible to dislike this record. It's excellent.

So yeah, fucking get this record.

-Idle