Track Premiere: Santi Suede—’Never Evergreen’
Posted: by The Editor
Although Santi Suede‘s upcoming mini-album China Heart is full of warm guitar strums, sunny synth bounces, and cheery samples of chirping birds, there’s an element of gloom in its song titles—”Decline,” “Braindead,” and “Doomed,” to name a few—that fit its early February release. For the Philly musician, it’s a time of year when the dismal temperatures and ceaseless snow have worn their wear on his East Coast residence, when the charm of winter has turned to a resistance of its bitterness, carried out by lengthy periods of avoiding the outdoors that quickly turn from comforting, to anxiety-inducing, to an oddly numbing acceptance of this routine hibernation. It’s a strange time of year for Northeasterner’s, and although Santi Suede doesn’t sing specifically of this seasonal condition on China Heart, a song like “Never Evergreen,” the record’s fourth track, is peculiarly reminiscent of it.
“There’s no one special on my mind / my brain is loving all the free time and red wine,” he sings of a newfound independence that borders on loneliness—much like the isolation of being stuck indoors for weeks on end—in a Stephin Merritt-esque tenor. The track is a snappy psych-pop number that joins the fuzzy pep of Hoodwink’d-era LVL Up with the misleadingly upbeat surf-rock of Surfer Blood’s dreary, 2017 record, Snowdonia (which was last year’s version of February blues, or in their case the death of a bandmate, turned pop-rock).
China Heart covers a lot of ground (Fire Is Motion-ish heartland rock, Magnetic Fields-y folk, more psych-pop), but “Never Evergreen” is both a fitting score for this time of year and a great introduction to the project, which is out in full via Bee Side Cassettes on 2/9.
Stream the track below:
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Eli Enis | @eli_enis
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