Kai Slater is obsessed with the past. For those of us who share his interests, that’s working out splendidly. Slater, a 21-year-old Chicago singer-songwriter, first gained renown as a member of Lifeguard, a trio whose noisy, melodic post-punk songs turn ’70s and ’80s classics into rocket fuel. He dresses like a mod dandy and publishes a handmade zine titled for NEU!’s krautrock classic “Hallogallo.” It’s not just that he devours the stylistic palette of the 20th century underground; he’s also keeping the flame for its DIY ethos, gritty and grounded in community.
Some of the leading figures from that world have taken notice. Lifeguard signed to Matador Records, one of the current indie landscape’s most direct links back to the years before Alternative Nation. Perhaps the connection was forged through Lifeguard member Asher Case, whose dad Brian (now of FACS) was in Matador band the Ponys, or Isaac Lowenstein, whose sister Penelope is in current Matador greats Horsegirl, but the point is Gerard Cosloy liked what he heard. Meanwhile Slater’s solo project Sharp Pins ended up under the umbrella of K Records, whose Calvin Johnson cultivated his own retro-minded youth culture in Olympia decades ago.
With Sharp Pins, Slater turns his attention to lo-fi power pop. The project’s debut Radio DDR humbly appeared on Bandcamp as a benefit for Palestine Children’s Relief Fund last year before K’s Perennial imprint reissued it with bonus tracks this past March. Slater is already following it up this week with Balloon Balloon Balloon, a 21-track motherlode that often channels Bob Pollard and sometimes bypasses him to evoke the same ‘60s records that informed Guided By Voices in the first place. He told Rolling Stone he made the album in his bedroom with “a fake Vox Phantom,” “a fake Rickenbacker,” and a boombox-style cassette deck, jubilantly pushing his equipment to its limit. He also confirmed the convergence of band name and album title was intentional wordplay. Sharp Pins, Balloon Balloon Balloon: “If you put it together… pop!”
As usual, Slater does not attempt to hide his influences, instead wearing them so proudly that they seem less like a borrowed aesthetic than an outpouring of his deepest self. “Popafangout” bursts from the gate with Byrds-y jangle, Slater’s 12-string arpeggios accented by waves of flange. “I Don’t Have The Heart” is first-rate moptop-era Beatles pastiche, from its handclaps to its wordless backing vocals to (especially) its delicately teeny-bopping vocal melody. When “I Could Find Out” bottoms out into a muffled guitar-vocal outro, the implied GBV worship comes to the foreground for the first of many times. By the time advance single “Queen Of Globes And Mirrors” glitters into the frame, it’s all become a collapsed continuum: Chiming ’60s psych-pop blurs into buzzing ’90s lo-fi, all of it melted down into an infinite present.
Balloon Balloon Balloon carries on like so for 44 minutes. Sometimes you get flashes of Alex Chilton or the dBs or the Elephant 6 collective or even Rivers Cuomo, all of them disciples of the same power-pop lineage. The spirit of Pollard lingers over all of it, not least of all in Slater’s embrace of quirks, flaws, and irregularities. Countless power-pop also-rans have attempted some version of this, but few have so fully embodied the source material, and even fewer wrote songs strong enough to justify the exercise. Any radical adherence to the ways of old runs the risk of slipping into mere reenactment, and there’s a whiff of that here and there on Balloon Balloon Balloon. But Slater mostly sidesteps that trap by virtue of both enthusiasm and quality. How can this music be a dead language when he’s keeping it so vibrantly alive?
Balloon Balloon Balloon is ou 11/21 on Perennial.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer
• De La Soul’s Cabin In The Sky
• Tobias Jesso Jr.’s s h i n e
• Haley Heynderickx & Max GarcÃa Conover’s What Of Our Nature
• Glitterer’s erer
• Dendrons’ Indiana
• Glyders’ Forever
• Delaney Bailey’s Concave
• Max Richter’s Hamnet Soundtrack
• Geoff Barrow’s GAME – Original Soundtrack
• Sub Focus’ Contact
• Twin Shadow’s Cadet
• S.C.A.B.’s Somebody In New York Loves You!
• The Futureheads’ Christmas
• Ella Eyre’s everything, in time
• ILUKA’s the wild, the innocent, & the raging
• Big Bill’s Sick Myth
• Iona Zajac’s Bang
• Ransom & Conductor Williams’ The Uncomfortable Truth
• Bad Trips’ Nothing But Trouble
• Charlotte de Witte’s Charlotte de Witte
• Keaton Henson’s Parader
• Peter Knight’s The Coiling Of The Tide
• Lou Salome’s Just Something You Cared About In High School
• Pavey Ark’s More Time, More Speed
• SUDS’ Tell me about your day again.
• Anthony Moore’s On Beacon Hill
• Ioa Beduneau’s Mélodies pour Clairons
• Tristan Perich & James McVinnie’s Infinity Gradient
• Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello’s Trinity
• Mischa Blanos’ Take Control
• Various Artists’ Music For Everyone Volume 2: A Compilation In Support Of The ACLU
• Max Jaffe’s You Want That Too!
• Rufus Wainwright And The Pacific Jazz Orchestra’s I’m A Stranger Here • Myself – Wainwright Does Weill
• Gasket’s Gasket
• Magic Fig’s Valerian Tea
• Stryper’s The Greatest Gift Of All
• Zach Tenorio’s Field Trip
• Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Changes In Air
• Rainshadower’s Charred Scars
• Annisokay’s Abyss – The Final Chapter
• Salt Collective’s A Brief History Of Blindness
• Morning Seance’s Eternal Life Makes Your Past Grow Too Big
• Shordie Shordie’s Love Lost
• The Weak Days’ The Magic’s Gone
• Jimi Tenor’s Selenites, Selenites!
• Slonk Donkerson’s Upgrade To Premium
• Fabiano Do Nascimento’s Cavejaz
• Stray Kids’ Do It
• Tribal Gaze’s Inveighing Brilliance
• Chip Kinman’s Chip Kinman
• Aya Nakamura’s Destinée
• Meredith Adelaide’s To Believe I’m The Sun
• NCT Dream’s Beat It Up
• Ray Charles’ No One Does It Like…Ray Charles!
• Blooming Fire’s riPPle eFFect
• Silhouette’s Silhouette
• Laney Jones And The Spirits’ Laney Jones And The Spirits
• Nick Drummond Band’s Unto The Breach
• SoFaygo’s MANIA mixtape
• Død Drøm’s Ensomme Jul
• Danny Daze’s ::BLUE:: [REMIXES]
• KISS’ Alive! 50th Anniversary Box Set
• Tate McRae’s SO CLOSE TO WHAT??? (Deluxe)
• The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (30th Anniversary Edition)
• GIFT’s Illuminator (Deluxe)
• Fine Young Cannibals’ FYC40
• The Beatles’ Anthology Collections Box Set
• Hüsker Dü’s 1985: The Miracle Year Live Box Set
• Eric Clapton’s Journeyman: Deluxe Edition
• Goldfrapp’s Supernature (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• Arny Margret’s I Miss You, I Do: The Sjáumst Edition
• Rockabye Baby!’s Lullaby Renditions Of Ariana Grande
• Aksak Maboul’s Before Aksak Maboul (Documents & Experiments 1969-1977)
• Creed’s The Best Of Creed
• Moses Sumney, Michael Thurber, & Twelfth Night Cast’s What You Will: Music From Free Shakespeare In The Park’s Twelfth Night EP
• Maria Somerville’s Luster (Remixes) EP
• Kelly Lee Owens’ Kelly EP
• Kyle M’s Winter’s Wish EP
• Winter Andrews’ ‘til the moon fades away EP
• Flesher’s GORE ON GORE EP
• Common Law’s EP EP
• Izzy Camina’s Neptune Mood EP
• South Arcade’s PLAY! EP
• Queen Quail’s Narcissus EP
• Crazy Paving’s So It Goes EP
• Spanish Love Songs’ A Brief Intermission In The Flattening Of Time EP
• Lisa O’Neill’s The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right EP
• Boys Life’s Ordinary Wars EP
• The Dead Betties’ Whitey EP
• Monroe’s SLIM. EP
• Donna Thompson’s What In The World?!? EP
• Fuzz Lightyear’s Zero Guilt EP
• Aerosmith & Yungblud’s One More Time EP
