Ducktails

iTunes Review

To understand the sun-bleached back-to-school vibe of Matthew Mondanile's Ducktails project, you might want to skip to the eighth track on his self-titled album. Delivered through a thin veneer of tape hiss and off-key vocals, "The Mall" is a willfully awkward reminder of afternoons spent fantasizing about girls in food courts, town parks, and long stretches of surf and sand. Kinda like The Wonder Years if it were set a couple of decades later and had a Pavement track as its theme song instead of a Joe Cocker tune. That said, Ducktails isn't indebted to the pillars of indie rock so much as dusty shades of drone, psych and experimental electronic music. All of this run through a hazy filter that gives off several hard-to-pin moments of revelation, from the ambient science-class arc of "Horizon" to the lo-fi Fripp & Eno-isms of "Surf's Up."