Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by the warm, woolly, indie hoedown that is Campfires’ Tomorrow, Tomorrow.
Frontman Jeff Walls explains how the album tells the story of people he once knew in Chicago – it’s a kind of imagining of their lives, complete with themes of death, drugs, love and uncertainty.
As you might expect from an album that speaks of past friends and places, there’s nostalgic feelings being thrown from every shake of the tambourine (“Fortune Teller”), every lazy lick of the guitar (“Rye Lovers Sword”).
The vocals are fuzzily distorted and are to be heard behind the instruments, rather than the other way around. Both vocals and instruments playfully speed up and slow down, sometimes independent of each other, with a pleasant, slightly dissonant effect.
It’s a very vintage and garage affair – though, of course, that’s how it’s supposed to be.
So successful are the band in being able to call to mind artists of yesteryear like The Kinks or The Yardbirds, that the four-piece are put in a category with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, though the former is more pop to the latter’s psychedelia.
In this, an age where the cult of the campfire is forgotten or fobidden, we can still take comfort in the fact that there are bands like Campfires to remind us of the joys of Simple Things (incidentally, the name of track three).
