Keepin' Time: Kings of Fox Park

Once in a great while you hear an album for the first time that perfectly matches up with where you are in your life at that exact moment. The vibe of the album syncs with where you are and the people you're surrounded with, and for the duration of the time you're alive and you hear those songs, it takes you back to that place. That happened to me this summer.

I spent this past summer in a big white house on Russell Street with four of the best friends a man could ask for. We started a band, we had a few too many ill advised gatherings, and the landlords absolutely hated us. Unsurprisingly, at the end of the summer we were rushed out pretty quickly and I had to find a spot to crash for a little while before my new lease started. My buddy Matt has a tendency to give me a free room when I'm homeless, and he and my friend Tim were more than happy to let me live on their couch for a week and some change before school started.

I haven't been that content for a long time. The three of us just went to work, came home, made dinner, had a few drinks on the porch and listened to music, every day. It was like a nice little vacation before the start of classes, and Matt and Tim and I really had a blast just laughing and enjoying each other's company.

During my stay I picked up a copy of the new Wavves album, "King of the Beach." Matt and I had a few beverages one night and sat on the porch and listened to it in its entirety. I don't think we said a word the whole time during first spin, and when it was over we started it again, and then one more time after the second go through. For some reason (Alcohol? Summer heat?) those songs just hit us both like a ton of bricks. We were sitting in lawn chairs facing each other on a balcony overlooking a lot of nothing, and once in a while we would just look up at the same time and look at each other as if to say "Oh yeah, that's really good."  We couldn't wait to play it for Tim, and when he heard it he just smiled and nodded his head along. He got it too. It became the nightly ritual that week for the three of us to sit around and laugh while "King of the Beach" played in the background.

There was something about it; the sunny choruses, the trippy lyrics, the ringing guitars, which made it the album of the summer, even though we didn't hear it until the last week. I think we knew every single word after three or four days. I remember Matt and Tim and I agreeing that it sounded like the Beach Boys jamming with Green Day, and after a couple months to let that assertion gestate, I think we hit the nail on the head. It's the kind of album that's so poppy it's cheesy, but there are these grungy layers beneath the sheen that add sprinkles of drug addled danger throughout the songs. 

So when I'm in a bad mood these days, I throw on "King of the Beach" and think about that simple, carefree week I had with two of my closest friends, and that awesome album we discovered on a balcony in Fox Park. Sometimes it's not the quality of the songs or how catchy or heavy they are that make them memorable, it's the people you were with the first time you heard it that make it stick it in your head.