Ottawa’s Tropical Dripps show off their skills in surf/beach/psych-rock in their new tape Cool Dude. It highlights exactly what they’re good at, in a concentrated five-song chunk.
Cool Dude deserves to be pumped out of old car speakers or a half-functional ghetto blaster.
Garage rock always feels more real when it’s not trying to be. Filtering itself through tape hiss and weed smoke gets it into a dreamy realm unoccupied by radio-rock bands.
Musically, the album follows in the footsteps of garage acts like The Monks or 13th Floor Elevators, or more recently Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall.
Shouted vocals, distorted power chords, and catchy choruses are all central to the band’s sound. It doesn’t take any unexpected turns in terms of instrumentation, but the energy on the tape is as high as anything by big-name San Franciscan garage bands.
One of the tape’s strongest elements can be found in the second track, “Isolation.” It channels The Feelies through clean-tone guitars, and adds heavy-handed guitar solos and electronics. The track is decidedly more laid back than anything else on the tape, and allows for the band’s strength in writing melodies to come through.
The best capital-R rock song is the tape’s closer, “We’re All Going Away.” The song builds slowly and eventually throws multiple guitar solos over the chorus, until everything fades out.
The band isn’t re-writing the book of garage rock, but they’re penning jams that capitalize on their strengths. Fans of catchy punk or garage would find the listening experience rewarding. The tape as a whole is pretty cool, dude.
