Rating: 4/5
Review:
Surprisingly good
This is surprisingly good.
I'd not come across The Astronauts before, but tried them because I was
a sucker for surf music when I first heard it in the early 60s and still
am. I approached this with some
scepticism, half expecting it to be sub-Beach-Boys rubbish, but although it's
not in the Beach Boys/Jan & Dean class, it's very decently made and very
enjoyable.
Obviously, surf music was concerned with three topics and
three topics only: Surfing, Girls and Cars.
Competition Coupe is almost exclusively about cars, with the other two
getting a peripheral look-in occasionally.
It's fun, with several direct references to other songs of the era; the
title track (ironically, one of the weakest on the album) is obviously a
challenge to Little Deuce Coupe, woodies (as revered in Surf City) are
belittled and so on, and there's a wonderful bevy of familiar girls like Bony
Moronie[1], Short Fat Fanny, Susie Q and the like in Our Car Club. There's some genuine wit here and some
enjoyable, slightly basic but well played music, too. The instrumental tracks are all very decent,
with strong echoes of The Shadows, The Champs, Duane Eddy…you get the idea.
Competition Coupe isn't a long-lost classic, but it's a very
enjoyable album of fun surf music. I was
genuinely surprised by how much I liked it and I can recommend it.
[1]One of the great regrets of my life is that I never had a
girl named either Bony Moronie or Ram-a-lam-a ding-dong. I searched and searched, but amazingly never
found one.
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