ALBUM PREMIERE // River Gods – Let Me Live

Post by Misha

After months of groggy grey morning skies, the Los Angeles summer has finally tipped into a nosedive. The air is heavy, police choppers are louder, and sounds and smells bounce around the boulevards with a renewed boldness.

I think it has everyone scrambling a little to find the tune of their summer, now that it has finally descended. The other day I went to Forever 21 at The Americana and found myself Shazaming three different vacuous radio teen pop songs, playing them all the way home from Glendale with windows down on the freeway, trying them out for color and taste.

The anatomy of good summer pop is as ephemeral as it is simple: the hook of gold (of course) with production clean and cool enough to cut through the heat, windows-down blareable riffs, and, importantly, lyrics open just enough to interpretation to be shifted through the prism of the summertime trials and triumphs of everyone who sings along, and still come out profound and true.

When I talked to River Gods’ Shiraz Dhume a few months back about the influences on their new album he immediately said, “The OC.”

“You mean like… the TV show?” I asked, sincerely. It was an answer I had not been expecting.

“Yeah,  I’ve been watching the OC these past few months for the first time and it ended up having a huge impact on me. Like, I love that show.” He talked about connecting to the show for its ability to pluck universal truths from white upper-middle-class teenage melodrama (one theme in particular that made it onto the album was the dogged persistence of existential angst). And then there’s also the show’s soundtrack, iconic for its definitive curation of the mid-aughts indie and alternative scene, which stayed fresh in Shiraz’s mind during the writing process.

So, The OC is probably part of what makes Let Me Live such a perfect summer album. It certainly plays like a southern California montage – flying down the Pacific Coast Highway on the way to the beach in one moment, racing down the boardwalk the next, stopping for tacos and cold horchata in a styrofoam cup, watching the sun go down over the pier, limbs wrapped up with each other and fingers catching in salty hair. 

As precious and fleeting as summer itself, the songs rarely play much beyond 2 minutes. They are just long enough to hint at a deep bittersweetness – the inherent ennui of love, of youth, of pop music. If you listen closely you can catch glimpses of tragedy – but taken in at face value, with unfocused eyes trained somewhere out on the horizon, they take on a horoscope like quality, every line a fuzzy and immensely satisfying answer to a deeply personal question.

This album works so well for maybe the same reason The OC does: it delivers huge doses of sunkissed human drama against a hazy backdrop of palms and shimmering swimming pool blue. It transports its listener to the California sunshine but never far enough for total escape. It’s a fun, sad, satisfying 20 minutes down the highway toward the beach.

Let Me Live is out now via Dadstache Records. Buy it here.