Beach Fossils
Feb 25, 2010 at 1:47 PM By Nora E. Lindner
Rating: 6 /11 
According to their Myspace, Beach Fossils is a band of the Tropical/Pop/Jungle genre, which might in fact be the most apt description of their sound, and the sound of a lot of bands coming out of Brooklyn lately. It’s that lazy, mumbled singing, with relaxed accompaniment in the form of soft drums and gentle guitar wanderings that has become a staple for Sunday afternoons and mellow vacation mixes. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing here to tap your foot to. For instance, the song “Vacation” has some interesting discords in it — just intriguing enough to keep your attention.
Unfortunately, the lyrics spend a great deal of time on the far side of unintelligible, making it hard to judge the topics of discourse. This also leads to several of the songs being hard to distinguish from one another. Of course, this certainly isn’t helped by the fact that on several tracks the guitar solos are just as indistinguishable. The song “Youth” stands out as the most memorable with its upbeat pace, but the vocal track has more reverb then one could get in a naturally aquatic studio.
What Beach Fossils do they seem to do well, but time can only judge whether they can do anything else. The band, made up of Dustin Payseur, John Pena and Christopher Burke, are currently on tour.
Reader Comments (1)
rock and roll has a long history of unintelligible lyrics, I actually like that and it bears repeated listening. I disagree about the guitar work, I think these songs are full of simple but amazingly musical hooks. If you don't like the overall sound you should just listen to something else because every band records their art on purpose. I think these guys are only getting started and will evolve nicely because there seems to be a deep well of musical ability there.