Surf’s Up

They might make music born on the Florida coast, but Surfer Blood tell Camilla Pia why their appeal stretches
farther than the local beach…

We imagine listening to music surrounded by an array of bronzed hotties while the ocean spray tickles your toes feels mightily different to whacking on the iPod sat at the back of the drizzle-spattered 94 bus. But, despite their West Palm Beach, Florida origins, Surfer Blood’s tunes haven’t been lost in translation. Yes, even if the sand and sea seems like a distant place to you right now, you’re still going to adore ‘Astro Coast’. Fashionably scuzzy, intelligent and, most importantly, hugely sing-able, it’s one of the finest guitar debuts of 2010; nods to Weezer, The Shins, The Pixies and Modest Mouse making us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Now, we’ve heard that frontman JP Pitts is the mastermind behind the whole brilliant Surfer Blood shebang, so what’s this talented twenty-something really like and do we have to call him, *shudders*, dude? “Well, I’m not positive whether or not being from West Palm Beach has influenced us at all,” he says, just a few hours before they take to the stage in Glasgow. “If it has, it’s happened subconsciously because I didn’t set out to write beach music. I was never really part of that culture in fact and although I do like bands like The Ventures I wouldn’t call them huge influences. Florida just happens to be where we’re from… Not that we have a huge problem with surfers,” he adds quickly – it’s been reported in recent articles and press releases that the four-piece “denounce the surfer kids of their youth for making their high school experience miserable”. “That was a total misnomer,” Pitts explains. “Our drummer was a straight-up surfer dude in high school and I never really had a problem with surfer punks, in fact it always looked kind of fun to be one.” And while we’re setting records straight, let’s deal with another popular misconception about Surfer Blood, that because they’re both from Florida they are in some sort of musical cahoots with The Drums. “That surf rock tag is pretty shortsighted,” says Pitts. “I mean, I’m not offended by it, it’s not flabbergasting like people are saying we sound like Green Day or something, it’s just not particularly relevant. And don’t get me wrong, The Drums are good friends of ours and they’ve been super helpful but I don’t think that we sound similar at all.” Wrongs now righted, we can move on and get to the bottom of what makes Surfer Blood really tick; Pitts got into music from a young age when a school friend was given a Fender Stratocaster for his birthday, he taught the Surfer Blood singer/ guitarist some Nirvana songs and Pitts was hooked from then. “Music has always the central passion in my life and when I started out it was bands like Nirvana, Pavement, the Pixies, Fugazi and Dinosaur Jr. I was imitating,” he says, “and pretty quickly I progressed to wanting to write my own riffs.”
Soon Pitt came up with the blueprint for ‘Astro Coast’, which he recorded in his Boca Raton apartment with Pro Tools and three guys known by that point as Surfer Blood: Tyler Schwarz (drums), Thomas Fekete (guitar) and Brian Black (bass). They had met through high school and various gigs but finally sealed the deal at an after party for Miami’s Ultra Festival, an outdoor electronic music event that the band hadn’t actually attended.
The debut was recorded in six months (January to August 2009) and as Pitt explains, the fact that they couldn’t afford studio time actually served them well. “We did it properly, took our time over it and I learned a lot about recording and mixing in the process. The next record probably won’t be done in an apartment,” he laughs, “but the most important thing to me is to keep it close to home and in an environment where you feel comfortable and can spend all day trying out different guitar sounds and microphones. When you rush something, it definitely suffers.” Surfer Blood return to the UK this summer, but by then you can expect to hear a different sound from them altogether. “It’s inevitable that our songs have evolved since we started touring,” Pitt says. “We are constantly trying out new things, and sometimes you step on the wrong pedal and it makes some crazy sound that actually ends up sounding awesome so we keep it. There are a million different ways that our songs can be interpreted,” he adds, “so when people come and see us in a few months from now the set will be radically altered.”

‘Astro Coast’ is released on Kanine on June 7th.