When it comes to making good music in Northern Colorado, everyone has their own approach. Some bands seek perfection with meticulous engineering and crisp productions, and others want a wall of sound made up of what feels like thousands of tiny moving parts. Then there are bands like safekeeper who just don’t give a shit.
– Photo by Ben Ward
bummer beach bonanza is the appropriate follow up to their 2018 EP, on sludge summit, and it is a glorious mess. Sludgy, gleaming, and often frantic, principal songwriter and band leader Zach Visconti continues to put his early Modest Mouse and Pavement influences on full display to everyone’s delight.
Photo by Ben Ward
Visconti returned to recording at his house in Fort Collins with drummer Matt Scorca and guitarist/bassist Ben Ward, carving out this five-track hunk of an EP over the course of 2019. While it is a noticeable improvement in production from on sludge summit, it’s the messy lo-fi quality of bummer beach bonanza that gives it charm and that extra something special you need in making a stand-out indie rock record. Visconti doesn’t mess around on this EP as the whole thing clocks in at around eighteen minutes, including “CANNONBALL!!” a one minute blaster, because – why the hell not?
bummer beach bonanza paints a dreary and apathetic picture of the West Coast in a strange and ponderous ode to the place where Visconti grew up. “mountain gods” starts off the EP in what feels like a foggy drive up the coast. “you’re all small” and “lonely buildings” are sort of reminders of how small we are on this planet but it’s title track “bummer beach bonanza” that summarizes it all nicely: “Let’s go down to bummer beach,” safekeeper proclaims, “and see how disappointing everything can be.”
Safekeeper celebrate, er just rock-out the release of bummer beach bonanza on Saturday, March 21 at Pinball Jones Campus West in Fort Collins. Click on thesafekeeper.bandcamp.com and wait disappointedly until then.
