Sharing their logo with a cheap tattoo Summer City bring the sun back with them on their new EP Reprobates. The York based trio with their competitive technical college aesthetic aren’t all that bad; their poppy electro-punk music is down to earth and is in fact disproportionately fancy.
However this extended play is a lyrically self-defeating pairing, which isn’t the best way to herald in the coming summer. Riffing on negativity like it’s something to feel happy about. Not that negativity as a concept is a particularly bad thing but when it comes sugar coated by pretty synth lines and sweet guitar parts it feels like a tasteless happy pill. The societal appropriation of crazy thematically used in masking the angst behind the message of reprobates twinges like bland urbanality.
With the lyrical musing of “you’re just a pretty little image” in the closing track Summer City epitomizes and concludes the EP with a familiar irony. The colours and tones of the music behind these vapid compliments create a rich landscape that’s populated with stick figures having a dialogue about having a laugh. We don’t often apply the Bechedel test to music but if we did this would be an inversion of the principles intended by its purpose. Reprobates: Musically GOOD. Conceptually BAD.
6/10
