Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley of Summer Camp serve up their first LP, Welcome to Condale, as a time warp to 1980s suburbia. The first thing you see when visiting the band’s website is the phrase “Everything changes when you grow old” with a line that strikes through it and enter a limited space of the fictional suburb of Condale, California in 1984.
It feels like the listener should be a teenager in the ’80s while listening to the album but one doesn’t need to visit the site to know this is heavy on references. Just by looking at the track list, “Last American Virgin” and “Brian Krakow” stand out as decade specific. Much of the sound is reminiscent of familiar ’80s pop songs like those in any classic teen movie montage sequence of the time; the beginning of “Brian Krakow” immediately brings to mind a slightly modern sounding version of Footloose.
The first track “Better Off Without You” is a fun song that makes a good intro to the album and has a Lily Allen bright-but-sassy charm combined with Blondie-esque vocals. It feels like Summer Camp is playfully exploiting everyone’s inner teen girl moment when post breakup your ex is no longer the person who you kind of miss, but has reached the annoyance level of “I’m about to change my number.” “Summer Camp” also has that teen girl sound, vaguely like early 1960s top 40 pop like The Shirelles with lyrics like, “I was searching for / I was hurting for / someone just like you / now I’ve found you.”
Despite the upbeat quality to some, the lyrics on many of the tracks are ironically sad and nostalgic; “Losing My Mind” and “Done Forever” both talk about lost love and failing relationships and “Welcome to Condale” is a kind of faulty look at suburban living. It’s suggestive of another time but in a modern and unique way and questions if Summer Camp’s next project will be an extension of this style or if they’ll evolve to another decade, 1990s maybe?
I love that summer camp experience.I like every tracks mentioned above.Thanks for this informative article.