Beach Bunny
Tunnel Vision
AWAL
Actual time travel may not be possible, but one surefire way of escaping down a temporal wormhole is through music. Obviously, it’s most potent when you hear a song from your youth that you haven’t listened to for years, and which immediately transports you to a time when said song was an important part of your life—but it can happen with new music, as well. Chicago-based Beach Bunny’s third full-length, Tunnel Vision, is a case in point. As soon as the ’90s-recalling, rose-tinted nostalgia of opener “Mr. Predictable” hits (just listen to how that chorus soars!), you’ll likely be transported into a kind of parallel universe familiar to anyone, whether they lived through the tail end of the 20th century or not.
It’s perhaps no surprise that the fifth song is called “Clueless.” Even if it doesn’t explicitly reference it, just from this record’s style of music (and its cover art), it’s impossible not to think of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie of the same name. Actually, though, it’s a rumination on the carefree nature of youth, childhood innocence set to a wistful melody that wrestles with the universal experience of getting older and all the existential and emotional questions that revolve around the ineluctable passage of time. Indeed, that’s a recurring theme on these songs—in the beautifully pained and urgent rush of “Chasm” and the quasi-grunge defiance of “Pixie Cut,” in the calm-after-the-storm anxiety of “Vertigo” and the insistence of “Violence,” the latter of which morphs from being an internal, existential struggle about the human experience into a more politically and socially conscious take on being alive within the context of the horrors of this world.
The juxtaposition between those internal and external horrors, and what seems like the happy-go-lucky nature of these power-pop/punk/grunge tunes, only serves to make these songs even more powerful, albeit subtly so. Because if you don’t pay attention to what Lili Trifilio is singing about, you could find yourself lost happily inside the nostalgia of your disappeared youth. But listen a bit more carefully and you’ll discover a record that has a lot more to say about both the present times we live in and the human condition. A hugely enjoyable third album from a band who deserve the world, both past and present.
