eMusic Review 0
Condale doesn’t exist, at least outside the heads of London duo Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Walmsley. It’s a make-believe subdivision of what the title track calls “slow-mo lines of leafy suburban streets” and, “a great place to raise kids, but they never will grow up.” If this — an imaginary American setting for teenage melodrama — sounds familiar, that’s intentional. Summer Camp’s debut album is an explicit homage, in style and content, to the lives and loves of Shermer, Illinois — the equally fictional setting of John Hughes’s canon of iconic ’80s films, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, The Breakfast Club and so forth.
Welcome To Condale is emphatically not, however, an exercise in jeering period kitsch. While it appropriates the tropes of the ’80s hits that filled the soundtracks of Hughes’s films — the somewhat cloying vocals, the verging-on-cheese synthesisers — it taps skillfully into the same essential melancholy from which the films profited, selling teenagers a heavily stylized portrait of an adolescence infinitely preferable to reality (this has, of course, been what pop music has done for decades, which is another reason Hughes’s films were so successful).
Summer Camp also bring native influences… read more »
