For the weekend, a new song from Teen Runnings! It finds them creating beach-side fuzz rock that just bops along…until you start zeroing in on the lyrics, which reveal a slightly less pleasant day by the sea. Highlights one of their best attributes, which is the ability to sound cheery as heck but conceal a lot of pain within. Listen below.
For most of their existence, Teen Runnings (formerly Friends) coated their surf-rock in feedback and distortion, an intentional move meant to fracture what was otherwise warm nostalgia for a time the group never lived through. New demo track “Sightseeing” initially offers up a bit of a departure for the group – it sounds super clear. The drums come through without any sonic obstruction, and the guitars are “Kokomo” smooth. Lead singer Syouta Kaneko even sounds unmuffled.
Turns out the unease lining their more dissonant work shifted to the lyrics. Teen Runnings’ words have always been a mix of bright-eyed innocence and unease – “yesterday I met you/I think I love you” is puppy-dog naive, but also kinda creepy. “Sightseeing” is about traveling and, well, sightseeing, but it isn’t totally upbeat. Our protagonist wants to meet new people, but one line hints at the fact they don’t seem to have many chums in their hometown. A line like “Though memories will disappear in 2 weeks and even forget the names of the buildings we’ve been to” hints at the futility of travel, while the main character’s mother even shows up to sort of look at the proposition of travel funny. Yet, like the music, brightness still breaks through. The whole thing can best be summed up in the best line – “See the towns, see their darker sides. There’s no paradise that you hope to be/Now feel the sun, see those birds flying. Don’t get butterflies, that’s the world for you.” Listen below.
Teen Runnings have teamed up with California indie-pop band Sea Lions on a new split release called Home Recordings. Neotomic Records!, who write that they are “purveyors of indie and bedroom pop,” are releasing Home Recordings as a limited-run cassette. On the Teen Runnings side of things, this split features a handful of demo songs that have popped up online in some form or another over the past two years, including the trio’s cover of Maroon 5’s “Won’t Go Home Without You.” Right now, you can listen to the song “We’ll Never Stay Together,” which is pretty much Teen Runnings at their most Teen Runnings-ish: surf-pop sounds featuring forlorn vocals, all being crushed by feedback. Listen here.
Tokyo trio Teen Runnings will be releasing a CD version of last year’s Let’s Get Together Again – an LP that hit shelves when the group was still known as Friends – on August 8, featuring a few new songs. In advance of that release, the group have a new, surf-filled video for the song “Make It Better,” which you can watch above. The clip was created by Videotapemusic, who manage to make what could have been another boring found-footage video into something eye popping.
Vancouver-based blog Hearing Gold put together a special compilation titled Vacation Spirit in advance of the summer months. They write that these are “15 exclusive songs documenting the sounds of a blissful summer as personally expressed by their respective artists.” One of the contributors is Japan’s Teen Runnings, a trio that seems pretty well-suited to provide some rough-edged guitar rock to a compilation about the warmer months. “Take You Away” opens with a fuzzy vocal sample about surf music…turns out it is like beat music…before launching into the feedback-soaked pop Teen Runnings have been tooling around with for a while now. It’s short, but prime Teen Runnings. Listen below, or get the comp here.