The Submarines

Everything is beach-y keen and totally waterproof on The Submarines' Honeysuckle Weeks. For a band with a submersible name, the married duo of John Dragonetti and Blake Hazzard certainly keep things light and buoyant throughout their second full offering. Recorded in the couple's garage cum studio in East Los Angeles, the new disc is a sparkly mix of SoCal indie pop just begging to score a Grey's Anatomy montage. Warm electronic flourishes, keyboards and cymbals meld with good old-fashioned strumming' to bore an easy, breezy 35-minute spectacle.

The Submarines' first CD, Declare a New State, was an odd sort of collaboration; Dragonetti and Hazzard wrote separate parts of that record during a break-up. When they reunited, they put them together. Honeysuckle Weeks, in turn, becomes their first actual collaborative effort—and it avoids any of the achy, break-y heart sentiments they might once have felt. Charming jaunts like "You, Me, & the Bourgeoisie" and "Swimming Pool" are splashy and drip with sentiments of love, while the playful whistling and pop la la la's of "Fern Beard" make it hard to not feel the good vibrations. Hazzard, an unplugged Liz Phair sound-alike, adds a little glitter to Weeks' handful of tracks, but it's truly Dragonetti's instrumentation that strikes sonic gold. It shouldn't take you until the disc’s dreamy closer, "Brightest Hour," to see there's a whole lot keeping this Submarines album afloat.

—Matthew Allard
05.09.08