No Pain In Pop

Swinging Jaw: Ducktails

Sun jammer extraordinaire Matthew Mondanile glides solo as Ducktails and with a pack of childhood friends in the more song-bound efforts of Real Estate. He’s not from the beach but his songs are about the beach. He told us about his love for the beach, staring out the window and Pacific City.

Read the jabber in full at the Viceland music blog



MP3: Ducktails - Point Pleasant Beach/Pizza Time

Tags: ducktails, matthew mondanile, pacific city, real estate, vice

Chapel Noise

Photography by Forrest B. Payne

People don’t seem to write ’songs’ any more. Most of today’s avant-rock motley seem keener to replicate the ‘tracks’ of dance music, tapping into the repetitious and blood-bound power of loops so that finite structure disappears, leaving four minutes of sound you’re sure have been playing forever somewhere and will go on playing long after your ears leave them behind. Night Control, the work of Rosemead, California’s Christopher Curtis Smith, feels like a collision between the song-built narratives of old modernity and the current blossoming of pop into aural omnipresence, one bristling up against the other like crematory fires to balsa wood. Smith’s pop - recalling fragments of sound lost on long train rides by The Beatles, Tom Petty, Jonathan Richman, Dylan, Velvets - isn’t buried beneath a slop of noise. Rather the noise goes skidding into the soft pop like an express train bursting through a blue whale’s heart, red membrane scattered this way and that, spectacular confusion reigning in the slow motion millennia before anyone feels a thing.

‘Good Looks’ and ‘For The Lanes’ are taken from Death Control, an album out now through Kill Shaman records. Thanks to Matthew Mondanile for the tip on this one.



MP3: Night Control - Good Looks



MP3: Night Control - For The Lanes

Tags: christopher curtis smith, death control, kill shaman, night control

Pack of Smokes

When I asked Matthew Mondanile - AKA the lime soda suppin’, sun seekin’ Ducktails - to tell me about one of the other bands he plays with, he was pretty keen to impress that Real Estate “is an extremely summer vibe band. We started in the summer.” Not a great deal surprising about that perhaps, given past form, but where Mondanile’s other projects seem driven half-mad and psyched to the point of heat delirium, Real Estate - whose tracks are written in the most part by fellow New Jerseyan Martin Courtney - seem to recline while the heat is fast fading from the day, the time come for T-shirts on and six packs to get cracked.

Longing yet? Winter Solstice in just over a week. Best check the golden slithers of guitar stretching and swooning across the soft grass of ‘Fake Blues’ and ‘Black Lake’ as they meander towards transcendental contentment. “Real Estate is a quartet,” Mondanile continues. “We have two guitars, bass and drums. It’s a ‘classic’ band. We play pop.”

Rudeboy keeps the conch after ‘the jump’.



MP3: Real Estate - Fake Blues



MP3: Real Estate - Black Lake

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Tags: martin courtney, matthew mondanile, real estate, summer vibe band

Back On The Regs

Ducktails’ Matthew Mondanile seems like he’s got friends alive in every state in America. This blogged press from the LA Weekly places him in Massachusetts, while some of the most recent photographs from his Flickr account find him horsing around beneath Californian palms. When he sent his latest email across to me he’d just got back to New York from Philadelphia. The tracks posted at his MySpace page (location: Ridgewood, New Jersey) pan out in a way that makes it hard not to conceive of Mondanile as a surf dude on the drift, gently overwhelming with squinting, red-eyed guitar like slithers of emergent sun; sand shaken from beach bass bins by bluntsucking, bottle-draining tumbles of keys and noise. More specifically: rad, rad times that fall between ears hearing The Durutti Column and earlier Ecstatic Sunshine. We’ve a couple of downloads for you – ‘Point Pleasant Beach’ and ‘Pizza Time’ fall hazily into each other just like they did on the A-side of a 7” put out by Breaking World Records (buy) and another, longer jam called ‘Surf’s Up’ which you should watch with the video lurking after the jump.



MP3: Ducktails - ‘Point Pleasant Beach’/'Pizza Time’



MP3: Ducktails - ‘Surf’s Up’

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Tags: beach jams, ducktails, jetpack, matthew mondanile, not not fun, sun araw, surfs up, wavves