A jangly guitar. Hand claps. A chiming glockenspiel. Beneath them, the beat revs up and gets driving. It already feels sunny, which is fitting: it’s the opening moments to the Buttondowns’ “Endless Summer,” the first single off the New Haven-based band’s latest release, Top of the Pops.
“I think of you everywhere I go,” songwriter and lead singer Robert Obie sings. “Cotton candy for the drive-in show / With a runabout down by the pier / We could run away so far from here / And we could have an endless summer.”
The Buttondowns — Obie on guitar and lead vocals, Eric Bloomquist on bass, John Santarsiero on drums and other percussion, and Nathaniel Hintz on lead guitar — have been making the rounds of New Haven’s clubs for a couple years now, and on Top of the Pops you can hear why. With backing vocals by Kriss Santala and The Sawtelles, keyboards by Vic Steffens, and saxophones by Kenny McKinnon fleshing out the sound, the Buttondowns on Top of the Pops reaffirm a commitment to a kind of rock ‘n’ roll that isn’t heard much anymore — the optimistic kind.
That commitment runs pretty deep. Even on the more wistful “All For That,” maybe the singer’s going through a rough patch, but the music suggests that everything’s going to be fine, particularly in the guitar work between Obie and Hintz and the glowing backdrop that Steffens lays down on keyboards.
“Gotta Let You Go” likewise bursts with affirmation even as Obie details the end of a romantic relationship. “I’m through spinning my wheels / now I’m shifting gears,” he sings. “No more wasted dreams / no more wasted years / There may be storm clouds up ahead / And angry skies are turning red / But I’ll find sunny days instead.”
It’s a sound somewhat at odds with the current state of rock music, which is now the age of plenty of great-grandparents and is no longer the dominant force in popular music that it was. Among the genre’s innumerable sub-genres, some are thoughtful and introspective; others are harsh and angry in ways that might have surprised the previous generation of rock musicians. Still others push the boundaries of what rock music can be to the point that fans argue about whether it’s rock music anymore, and in a deeper sense, whether there is any rock to speak of.
The Buttondowns sidestep all of that by returning to an earlier form of the music, and self-consciously, to an earlier time. The throwback feels utterly intentional, starting with the band’s name, following with the album’s name, and proceeding to the name-check of the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer, the band’s 1974 greatest-hits album that was itself a repackaging of stuff the band had recorded a decade earlier, mostly before Brian Wilson decided he didn’t want to write pop songs anymore and instead write teenage symphonies to God. You could accuse it of wrapping itself in nostalgia to work. But Top of the Pops also reminds us that there was a point when rock music was, like a lot of R&B is now, a lot of fun.
“There’s a sound that’s coming on strong / There’s a feeling that’s been gone too long / There’s a way to say what I want to say and a way to do what I want to do / but I can’t do it without you / Everywhere tonight, you can feel it / Everywhere tonight,” Obie sings on “Everywhere Tonight.” What’s wrong with feeling good about that?
