Cassette Review: Coastal Car "Silent Moons, Silent Rooms" (Already Dead Tapes)

$5 //
Edition of 60 //
https://alreadydeadtapes.bandcamp.com/album/ad276-coastal-car-silent-moons-silent-rooms

This is my second time hearing Costal Car and the biggest thing which sticks out to me about their previous cassette "Lossless" is that I felt like it was kind of like the Beach Boys in the way that I wanted to roll the windows of my non-existant car down and blast it out of the speakers while people rollerbladed by on the boardwalk of some beach which may or may not exist.

On "Silent Moons, Silent Rooms" Coastal Car seems to stay on their track with their sound but also develop it into something more grand and I really enjoy that.  The hardest part about hearing an artist for the second time is that you have to get over two major obstacles: not feeling like these songs are just more of the same from the first set and also not feeling like they're worse either because both are just stand out reasons to stick with the first album and ignore the second.    Luckily, Costal Car has neither of these issues.

"Me, Myself and I" is a dreamy song with what sounds like a voice mail coming through in place of singing.   The singing comes on though and the acoustic melodies remind me of something between EFS and back when I used to listen to a lot of twee.  I'm not even joking- there was a time in the early '00's where I listened to a lot of music that was twee based (thanks to HHBTM) and I remember some of the artists now still such as birddog and feel like Costal Car would've fit in well with them back then.

Another interesting song is "Sunshine Girl" because part of it reminds me of Coldplay and part of it (the bass line) reminds me of U2's "With Or Without You".   I must admit, U2 is one of those bands that take a lot shit.  If you told me "You should listen to this band because they sound like U2" I'd laugh directly in your face, but the fact is, back in my younger years I used to tape songs off the radio and a lot of them were older U2 songs.   They just had that presence of having ten singles on the radio at a time and as a kid you didn't realize they were all by the same artist.

As there is an instrumental song called "Fall Be Kind" it goes into "The Changing of the Seasons" and really, if anything, winter should be kind because this year particularly it seems neverending.   One of the best ways I like to think of Coastal Car is being like that one song most bands have that is their acoustic number and it doesn't even always have to be a ballad.   But if you look at a lot of your favorite bands and especially the ones on the radio you'll likely find they all have that song which could be their version of Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah".    While not completely, Coastal Car does seem to be a collection of those types of songs. 

Am the only one who made the connection between Coastal Car and the Beach Boys because of the whole driving around the beach idea?   There is a line about listening to "Pet Sounds" for the nineteenth time so that can't be a coincidence, can it? Whether or not I am, I think it is kind of cool that Coastal Car is out to prove that they are not a singular weather type of band on this cassette.  (I understand that Coastal Car might be a one person show, but if you make this many sounds at once I'm going to call you a band)  While I related Coastal Car almost strictly with sunshine, songs about both the winter and fall are here and I'm not quite sure there is a better way to explain how these songs have grown yet stayed the same.