For fans of Gavin Caine, REM, Elliott Smith, power pop, and the jagged story arc of a summer in the city, Unalaska by The Alaskas builds on an impressively catchy sound by stripping back to folksier roots. The warm embrace of tape distortion lends extra energy to otherwise clean acoustic guitars, allowing these smart, snappy little melodies to put a spring in our step without even the presence of percussion. As we lean in closer to put these lyrics together, themes of failed romance emerge, but this doesn’t exactly happen in the ways we may expect. Instead, our speaker feels as if they’ve missed the opportunity to experience romance in the cinematic and literary sense, always seeing relationships fail in the most anticlimactic ways and experiencing an unexpected lack of those moments of clean closure that we see on the screen and the page. At this point, even a catastrophic heartbreak would satisfy this desire, but instead we find ourselves immersed in this gray purgatory of reality, a world which denies us access to clean plot lines and satisfying resolutions.
