[Fat Possum, 2011]
Written as a concept album documenting an 8-month sailing holiday around the East Coast of America, Cape Dory is very much an album of the moment. It's yet another surf-pop album with female vocals and a heavy layer of warm fuzz. More than a few bands have tried exactly this formula recently, foremost among them probably being the Dum Dum Girls and Best Coast, two albums I genuinely like a lot. This isn't a particularly challenging listen (or even, I'm betting, a particularly challenging write), but I definitely have a soft spot for this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, Tennis just don't really find it.
Some of the more laid-back melodies, like 'Bimini Bay', really are nice, and the album would be really good for a relaxing day at the beach, say. Singer Alaina Moore has a really pleasant voice, but one that it is hard to really follow the lyrics of in any meaningful way - it's more of a calming wash than it is giving anything approaching a definitive statement. Some of the songs on their own are pretty good, 'Marathon' being the obvious choice as a lead single and 'Baltimore' also being a standout track, but they just get washed away when they're part of the album as a whole. Cue bad 'beach pop' sandcastle metaphor.
This record acts as very nice background music. Its very twee (thats the adjective, not the musical style - with a small 't' rather than a capital, I suppose) and extremely inoffensive, but doesn't really manage to impose itself at all. At less than half an hour long, it's very easy listening - and might actually be approaching that much-maligned genre rather than those words just being a description. And no review can be complete without mentioning that truly terrible artwork. I have literally no idea how anyone could have thought that was a good idea - irony doesn't make absolutely everything OK.
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