Kelly Sembos
Sembos.
“Born on a Leap Year,” the first track from The Backyard Committee‘s new album Surf Hotel Ghosts, starts with a sunny riff that has just enough salty grit and dissonance to keep things interesting. The band drops in, expanding the emotions, until the singer’s plaintive voice seals it up, making the track happy and sad at the same time.
“It’s not the real thing / What is it for? / The time is wasting,” the singer coos. “It was lost, it was found, it was shimmering with sound / And she watched / It was all too much to take.”
The singer in question is Michael Sembos, the head of the New Haven-based Backyard Committee, who handles vocals, guitar, and songwriting. On Surf Hotel Ghosts, the committee included drummer Nick D’Errico, guitarist Eric Donnelly, guitarist Chris Cavaliere, bassist Tim Walsh, bassist Chip Johnson, and multi-instrumentalist Brian Larney, among others. It was recorded, as Sembos related in a Facebook post, in several spots — from CT studios Gold Coast Recorders to Tarquin Studios to someone’s backyard, from Iceland to the Black Rock Desert, from the recording booth at the Third Man Records storefront in Nashville to the basement at Big Pink. This shambolic sense of a collective piecing the record together from all over the place suits the album. Over 18 tracks, Surf Hotel Ghosts goes on journey on its own, on a road that drips and turns, yet it always seems sure of its destination.
“Born on a Leap Year” quickens its step to move straight into the next number, the sunny and groovy “Not Losing You.” Sembos keeps the full band sound for “You Cannot Tell Me Anything,” a song that successfully cribs from 1960s R&B to slow things down. “Southern Star” gets its boogie on. “Canada” might be the sunniest, most energetic song this reporter has ever heard an American band write about our northern neighbor. but it’s just a warm-up for the next song, “Star of the Bar,” which gets its party on right.
But “Canada” is preceded by “The Way You Do,” a sweet, quiet number that’s just Sembos’s voice and a fingerpicked guitar, and it doesn’t need anything else. The swing on “500 Years” is driven by a bass, shakers, and a tambourine. The album also makes room for diversions — the dreamy “Why Oh?,” the short song “Kelly Marie,” which sounds like it could possibly have been recorded on a landline, and “The Actual Northern Lights,” which has the sense of capturing a couple guys jamming in a room together.
Surf Hotel Ghosts follows the two albums Plains and Mountains, which were released in 2017. Before that was 2013’s Festival and 2010’s self-titled debut. It is perhaps safe to assume that Surf Hotel Ghosts was in planning long before the Covid-19 pandemic enveloped the world. But it takes on an added resonance in the time we’re living in. Surf Hotel Ghosts, in the way it was made, the expansive nature of its sound, and the content of lyrics, is in many ways an album about travel, about moving, about the way things sometimes have a way of coming back around while always never been quite the same. Those of us who thrive on physically traveling can’t do that just yet. But the album reminds us that we’ll be able to sometime — and whatever destinations we have in mind will be waiting for us when we get there.
