“In The Dark” by Summer Flake

Summer Flake have just released a third album – “Seasons Change” – on Australian label Rice Is Nice. Here’s the blazing 2nd track “In The Dark”:

Summer Flake is Steph Crase (also in Fair Maiden) and accomplices. Summer Flake’s music is an Australasian distillation of the kind of melodic guitar pop perfected in the mid 1980s by the likes of Let’s Active and The Windbreakers and further developed in the 90s by Scottish band Teenage Fanclub and the Juliana Hatfield Three.

The melodic music and vocal harmonies sugar-coat a darker kind of down-beat melancholy resignation about life’s curve-balls creating perfect bittersweet jangling & twanging post-grunge guitar pop.

“Wine Won’t Wash Away” by Summer Flake

When I first came across Summer Flake playing at a Camp A Low Hum music festival in 2013 they struck me as being a perfect Australasian distillation of the kind of emotionally devastating melodic grunge-pop perfected in the late 80s and 90s by Scottish band Teenage Fanclub.

This new album “Hello Friends” confirms that initial diagnosis but develops it further with a darker kind of down-beat melancholy and generally optimistic sense of I’ll-get-through-it hopelessness and resignation stirred through. Which is pretty much what the best pop does and why it makes us care. We’ve all been there, felt that sometime, right? Here’s “Wine Won’t Wash Away” from the album as a perfect example of what I’m on about.

The album is a welcoming mix of that almost jangling kind of post-grunge guitar-pop with a bit of shoegazey tremolo arm note-bending wooze (which I’m a sucker for at the best of times).

Vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Steph Crase uses her voice in lush multi-tracked backing vocal arrangements to give the album its emotional heart, most beautifully set out on the sublime late-Beatle-era pop stylings of “So Long”.

“Hello Friends” by Summer Flake is out now (well, 8 April to be exact) and is available on LP from Rice Is Nice Records. You really ought to get it.