Daytona :: "The Road"

Daytona, a New York three-piece, head relentlessly south on latest single, "The Road." With poly-rhythms in guitar loops and the lightly break-beat drums, "The Road" chases some of the Local Natives/Foreign Born/Lord Huron world-pop end of the independent rock pool. "The Road" recalls the melody of Talking Heads "Nothing But Flowers" so much that you can almost hear Byrne moaning "You got it, you got it" at the edges. The tropical-pop ode is surely reverence, or a bit of accidental genre derivation. Daytona's "The Road" is quite excellent in its own right, an irrepressible bit of pop to warm the corners.

Daytona :: "Undertow"

When Pela said, "yeah, there's an undertow, but it ain't got me" in 2007, the implied assumption was it would have gotten you by now. It was New York after all, an inverted version of Sinatra's "If I can make it there ..." thesis; if I can make it there, I'll be dragged out to sea. Pela, it is worth noting, is now We Are Augustines, opening for the Counting Crows, an undertow of an entirely different variety. Another Brooklyn band, Daytona, who sound a lot more like Beach Fossils, have a debut single with the same notion, "Undertow" and lyrics like "you'll never make it out alive" and "when the undertaker reads your palm and says, 'My son, you're going to die.'" The fear is tacit, even in the first movement where a waltzing tempo and fuzzy guitars collude to make it seem like all your Instagram photos are going to add up to more than solipsism, your twenties as a slow dance. The second movement is splashy, all flecking guitars and depressive lyrics leading to an updated Chopin's Awakening where the deadly current isn't in the water but you end up there anyway. If there's an undertow, it already has you.