Buzz is swiftly growing around nascent Aussie outfit The Coolites, and it's about to pick up a whole lot more steam with the release of their debut full-length album, Caravan Park Summers, today — and we at theMusic.com.au are pleased to be able to bring you the premiere stream of the new work in full.
listen: the coolites - caravan park summers
The Coolites may be a relatively new prospect, but they're no greenhorns — the band is the brainchild of renowned Sydney muso Simon Gibson, formerly of Sneeze, Modern Giant, the Aerial Maps and Lazy Susan, brought together upon Gibson's return to Australia following a seven-year stint abroad teaching in Vietnam.
Steeped in iconic Aussie aesthetics of yore — "the sun, surf, long drives and early '80s punk", to drop some publicity-speak on you — The Coolites have, with Caravan Park Summers, aimed to deliver an evocative, immersive album narrative that recalls a longing for days of forgotten innocence, or, in Gibson's words, "those holidays by the beach, when your parents gave you 20 bucks each and you disappeared for days on end down by the breakwall or up at the pinny parlour with other kids who had been drawn together under that caravan park sun".
"That's the feeling behind the new album; that sense of Australian heat, innocence and raw possibility," he said.
And the songs themselves promise to speak to antipodeans of all walks, right from the get-go — opening track Growing Up In Australia makes that perfectly clear.
"The Underarm Incident, Gough getting the sack, the marches against Vietnam are all events that shaped generations, regardless of your age," Gibson said. "Often these situations were very 'small' in the grand scheme of things but to us as Australians growing up at such a distance, both cultural and geographic, from the rest of the Western world, they seemed huge and incredibly important."
The Coolites will perform two album launch shows at home in Sydney to celebrate Caravan Park Summers' release: they hit North Bondi Golf & Diggers Club tomorrow, 30 May, and a few weeks later grace the Town Hall Hotel on 28 June.
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