Ducktails - Ducktails III Arcade Dynamics

Ducktails is representative of the waves of lo-fi, indie pop music that have been emanating from the US over the past couple of years. Ducktails III Arcade Dynamics is Matthew Mondanile's third album as Ducktails and he's proving himself to be surprisingly prolific at creating little hazy, acoustic summer love-ins.

The music is refracted by a sentimentality for the 1980s and is informed by various electronic elements, such as twinkling keyboards and processed beats, but it all remains very low-key. Mondanile's voice can be a bit underwhelming, but when he makes the effort, his lackadaisical vocal delivery can work well within the context of his swoony tunes.

Mondanile really does have a great ear for these nostalgic, tropical pop melodies; the hooks he sets up in the music often threaten to take him out of his lo-fi comfort zone. The album also has several effective instrumentals which work will considering that Ducktails is really just nostalgiacally soundtracking summers gone by.

With song titles such as 'Art Vandelay', named after a charcter from Seinfeld, we can see that Modanile is a popculture-vulture as much as he's a romantic slacker. The profusion of this kind of music, which we have seen this year from We Are Trees and even Wavves, is caused by the fact that these bands are made up of American kids, born in the mid-80s, who are now waxing lyrical about their own youth. These boys are staring back into the sunset, fondly remembering their megadrives and 90s sitcoms, looking for infinity in some pretty, pop melody.