All Girl Summer Fun Band - Looking Into It

Taking a break from all that dreary and depressing metal and hardcore, I'm going to give a quick listen to the sunny, new All Girl Summer Fun Band album "Looking Into It."

It's been about 5 years since the last All Girl Summer Fun Band Record (appropriately titled "2") taught us all how to love again, and what a rough fucking five years it's been.

Seriously. The All Girl Summer Fun Band are one of the few pure rays of joy and sunshine which break through the clouds of my cynical, cynical heart. "2" is like my official "everything sucks, I need a pick me up" record. It's literally IMPOSSIBLE to listen to it in a bad mood. If you ever meet someone who isn't cheered up by that record, kill them. Immediately. They're a sociopath and a danger to us all.

The best thing I can say about "Looking Into It" is that, despite the loss of a member to motherhood, the All Girl Summer Fun Band hasn't changed a thing since the last record. They still unapologetically play saccharine pop music so catchy that you'll need a vaccination to get it out of your head.

This is a very, very, very good thing.

They've turned up the distortion on some of the songs on this record a little bit, giving some of the songs a bit more of a power-pop, as opposed to jangly-indie-rock, feel, but that's about the only difference. The song, generally, remains ass-kickingly the same.

One of the things I've always liked about the All Girl Summer Fun Band is that they had this weird way of making ridiculously tacky and cheesy sentiment sound both sincerely unironic and backhandedly feminist. I try to imagine Avril Lavigne or Britney Spears or someone singing a song like "Tour Heartthrob," "Canadian Boyfriend," or "Not the One For Me" and it comes off as plastic and cynical. Somehow, though, the All Girl Summer Fun Band make songs about the simple, sweet little pleasures in life sound really urgent and thoughtful.

While poking around on their MySpace page while writing this review I think I got my answer to how they pull it off. Kim Baxter, AGSFB's singer, has her high school band's MySpace page linked to the AGSFB page. They're called The Young Astronauts and they suck REAL hard, but in that glorious high school band way, just like my first high school band sucked real hard, but somehow still managed to be the most important thing in my world.

As I was looking at this page for a band that hadn't been in existence in 13 years, seeing pictures of them hanging out in parent's basements and the like, it occurred to me that the reason I like AGSFB so much is that we apparently shared the same youth.

There was a certain kind of young person in the 1990s, after punks and metal kids stopped being scary (the 80s) but before they were appropriated by the cool kids (the 2000s) where there was this whole country full of kind of weird kids who didn't quite fit in but knew that there were a lot of other people like themselves out there who made shitty music and dressed kind of strange had their teachers tell them they didn't live up to their potential in school. As I looked at the pictures of The Young Astronauts I realized I was looking at pictures of me and my friends when we were that age.

Granted, Kim Baxter went on to form one of the best pop bands on six legs and I'm playing in a noisy metal band, but the sentiment is the same. There's a lot of us kids of the 90s who came of age after Metallica, Nirvana, and the Pixies but before Fall Out Boy, Limp Bizkit, and Avril Lavigne and we're all in our late 20s and early 30s, and trying to keep on doing interesting things with our lives because we know we grew up in a really unique time and we don't want to end up like those superficial teens from the 80s or those vacuous teens from the 21st century.

Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but I actually don't think so. All Girl Summer Fun Band are like the official spokesladies of forward looking 90s nostalgia, celebrating what was cool about our collective, alienated, youth back then while still keeping the ball rolling ahead.

Either way, the point is, the album is great. Maybe not quite as great as "2," but pretty close, and it's fucking awesome to have this band back and brightening up my life.

Pity they didn't get the record out in time for summer. I could have driven around listening to it with the windows down and REALLY relived the 90s.

Older song, but still awesome.

All Girl Summer Fun Band Website, where they all have clothing lines for some reason