13. Fifteen – Petroleum Distillation
Mid tempo Punk songs with bass intros, bouncing palm mutes, and guitar sliiiiiiides. Lyrics about reliance on fossil fuels and how passiveness can be a hazardous pastime if not acknowledged. Nothing sounds more like waking up into a stagnant and uncomfortable summer morning than this.
12. Old Crow Medicine Show – James River Blues
Wagon Wheel would be an obvious choice from the old crow camp, but this lazy commute down the currents of Virginia’s mighty James offers ultimate cool relief from the sun’s solar tentacles. Its about rivers man. Its about the pace of their waters and how they relate to the industrial revolution. A poor man’s melody, ablaze with fiddle and banjo.
11. Against Me! - Born on the FM Waves of the Heart
Against Me! ’s take on Summer lovin’. A duet between an exiled Gainesville orgcorer and a demure indie queen. It builds and builds like blind passion between lovers who meet in a crab shack bar by the beach. Then it just explodes and backfires into a crescendo that tares young leaves from tree limbs and sends them sailing to the ground. Courtesy of Mr. Warren Oakes.
10. This Charming Man – Sweet Delta Blues
Name any track off The ’59 Sound. That song is a summer classic, and so is that one. This Charming Man was Gaslight before Gaslight, and you can take the Gas out of This Charming Man, but you can’t take the anthem out, or something. Mr. Fallon crafts a ballad from every screened in porch south of the Mississippi. Tags: white suits, pipes, slow burning courtroom dramas, hot blooded southern women.
All about a white hot Memphis night, where the memory hangs heavy like mist on a field
All about a white hot Memphis night, the girl says they’ve seen a shadow with the blood in their eyes
If Gaslight re-recorded this chin blossom I would probably stomp on a sand castle.
9. Temple of the Dog – Hunger Strike
Try to find a song with more air in between the chords, and then try to toss back six shots of Maker’s Mark and not get drunk while rolling dice with the Montauk Monster.
8. Cave In - Dazed and Confused
Fucking sludge metal covers. Their should be more of them. This song is ten minutes and forty one seconds long, which is just enough time for your Subaru Forester’s AC to bottom out and fry in a pit of heat snakes, unfurling from the asphalt in waves. Blurring and distorting distant mirages of the ladies.
Essentially any pop punk song is a summer anthem. Coffee pots, the fleeting nature of frozen treats, day time TV, false circulated air, boredom, ineptitude, insomnia, the girls of summer. These images are the chest plate tattooed on 90s era America.
Summer ‘08. Pineapple Express. Bigfoot. The economy ship is tanking. The only thing left to do is for pirates to take to arms and start demanding their money back from the registers.
The Sword is beard fodder for winter but when ya gotta shave because its just too itchy and hot, you know its time for Saviours to take over. Maybe because stoner rock originated in the desert. Maybe its because when Saviours recorded Into Abaddon they somehow stored pockets of Oakland’s atmosphere into the master tracks.
September. First time I heard this song I literally thought there were cricket/peeper chirps in the background. Lucero is known just as this alternative country punk band but they are sonically one of the greatest ensembles ever to spill bourbon on a buzzard. Atmospheric punk n’ roll that just sounds muggy. But just as Lucero embraces heartbreak and alcoholism, they also embrace long, hot days when it feels like the sky is going to melt and paint everything gray. Bruce reference in the lyrics.
The clouds in the summer sky don’t do shit for the heat – the girls in their summer clothes, only slight relief
3. Sundowner – Midsummer Classic
It has “summer” in the title as well as the word “classic” which is a move done only if the jam can literally tear the leggings off a pair of jeans.
This acoustic anchor grill is about how thick, summer air causes the streetlights to appear hazy. It’s also about getting intoxicated in a public place and knowing that all of the fuzzy streetlight/lightning bug ass’s will vanish in the gentle blue cradle of the inevitable morning.
And underneath this crooked moon
I can smell the night begin to bloom,
the northern wind will change again
and my geography will bend back and forth
across the map until I reach the end.
And it’ll take some time.
But the dawn will come-
yeah the tide will rise.
Graduation. Barrrr-barnar-nar-narr-narrna-narr –nar . BAMT. –dar-darn-darnt-darrrr. Baroness is a band that writes music in a city that is almost always 2,000 degrees with fucking spanish moss just cascading off smoking cyprus bark into swamps infested with laid back alligators wearing sunglasses. Listen to this in the middle of the afternoon to drown out the sound of cicadas and lawnmowers. Or let the swelling insect calls and humming engines just harmonize with the drone.
Fuckin song is awesome.
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