Mod Mayday 23 — Sharp Pins

Mod Mayday 23 — Sharp Pins

If you’re familiar at all with the Chicago indie scene, you’re familiar with Kai Slater— either through his post-punk project Lifeguards or his solo, 60s fuzz-inspired solo endeavor Sharp Pins. But I can’t say if you’ve ever seen him in top form like he is on Sharp Pins’ fourth full-length release Mod Mayday 23.

Efforts like Balloon Balloon Balloon and his solo debut Turtle Rock, of course, established the delicious, analogue-steeped aesthetic of the project. Mod Mayday 23, however, sees Slater at his most infectious, his most experimentative, and his most flexible. The tracks, taken on an individual basis, bear the evidence.

Starting with the crackling strums of “It’s a Mod Mod World,” and moving into the space-filling instrumentations of tracks like “Face of Youth Today” and “B-A-B-Y Baby Love,” Slater shows not only a strong command of melody but of riding his chosen rhythms as well, and tracks like “Tonight’s the Night” and “Love Only Me,” with their Help!-era, Beatles-esque riffs and ripping forward momentum, are what truly establishes the project’s indelible tone.

Slater doesn’t shy away from some of the odder sounds of his operative sonic pallet, either. “Live Without Her Love” treads fully into the noisy garage-rock spheres of bands like The Pretty Things and The Kinks, shredding apart some of the softer moments on the project with pure, distorted, shutter-shaking guitar tones.

Slater, above all, is a master of melody. The hooks on almost every track have some sort of lasting imprint on the listener; there are tracks that might not be memorable in the depth of their instrumentation or the breadth of their explorations, but each one possesses a distinct impact driven home by Slater’s songwriting.

Mod Mayday 23 is, at its heart, an undeniably fun project— one presumably driven by Slater’s love for the rawness and unmatched, surf-rock laden energies of ‘60s music as a whole. But the fascination with an era, and the way in which Sharp Pins has successfully immersed itself in it, begs a question.

What makes Sharp Pins so appealing, especially when we have almost limitless amounts of music to explore from the actual era the project attempts to emulate? Perhaps it’s a bit of a banal question, but it’s worth exploring here.

Mod Mayday 23, of course, belies its age at times with its choice of Peach Pit or Day Glow-inspired guitar tones and motifs. But for the most part, the album is wholly and unapologetically itself. There is no burying of influences here, no sly pretension towards “originality” in the sense that musicians have insisted upon since the dawn of commercial art.

There is only pure intention— and well-executed intention, at that.

While all of Sharp Pins’ tracks emerge from the same conglomeration of genre samplings, each one manages to feel fresh in its own way. Especially on Mod Mayday 23, it feels like the project is constantly re-inventing itself; some new turn of a musical phrase or new expression of the motif is undertaken with each entry into the growing catalogue. 

It’s also an honest and uncompromising look in the mirror at the influences that underlie the continuous pursuit of the lo-fi sound we see in music today. Of course, Neil Young is cited as the primary influence of the current alt-country revival, and ‘90s acts like Sonic Youth and Slowdive are seen as the originators of the (slowly winding down) shoegaze movement. Why not go straight to the source? Why not dial into the still largely untapped energy of the pioneers of our current rock-n-roll palette?

And to do it without any self-deprecating irony, or any sense of pastiche, is an accomplishment in and of itself. Mod Mayday 23 is the most adept (and the most infectious) representation of this ethos in Sharp Pins’ catalogue to date.