by Jesse Jarnow
One would be hard-pressed to call Ducktails' self-titled full-length a "debut," given Matthew Mondanile's eight previous releases in 2007 and 2008 on cassette, 7", and LP. But the eponymous album is also Mondanile's proper coming out. Consolidating songs and ideas that he refined over his earlier one-man band output, Ducktails refines Mondanile's lo-fi beach pop (mostly) instrumentals into a pleasant mix of woozy structures and impossibly distant choruses ("Dancing with the One You Love"), pinched-voice indie rock ("The Mall"), and an 11-minute drone-out ("Surf's Up") that captures the best of Mondanile's cassette-obsessed aesthetic. (He has said that he only records on tape.) While the songs themselves aren't exactly hook-filled ("The Mall" recalls the sloppy » Read more