The Nude Party
Look Who’s Back
SELF-RELEASED
We can always use some good ol’ meaningless fun, can’t we? Now more than ever, right? Anyone? That’s the approach seven-piece rockers The Nude Party are taking, anyway. “Much needed levity” is the line they use in press materials, one that very much serves as the thesis behind their latest record, Look Who’s Back, a sonic wayback machine to a time when rock ’n’ roll was, in their words, “punchy, fun, and not overthought.” Of those three qualifiers, I would say the band does a pretty good job with the first two, and a fantastic job of living up to the latter. This isn’t a surprise: The Nude Party has never been shy about the overwhelming effect of influence, embracing the style, substance, and—perhaps most importantly—overall vibe of a period that predates them by several decades. This approach isn’t without its charms. Their 2018 self-titled record remains the most consistent effort in this regard. The band know their way around a three-minute ’70s rocker. The chops are there.
Now, five records in, that puts them…well, I’m not exactly sure where that puts them. “Cosplay” might sound harsh, but hell if it isn’t the word I keep landing on. Everything about Look Who’s Back elicits some coked-out A&R guy in the Valley getting worked up about the next big thing (that or an equally animated shirtless producer “yelling out on-demand riff commands” from the control room during an all-nighter, as the band reported to us). “Your love is electric to me (touch me baby),” they sing on “Love Is Electric,” a song sandwiched between earnest lines like “Every night they buzz around your hive, jive the same old phrases” and “Everything’s so out of sight, those city lights truly do shine so bright”—all delivered in the Jagger-meets-Lou-Reed growl of singer Patton Magee during what feels like the best karaoke performance you’ve ever witnessed.
“Good” or “bad” are hard qualifiers to even assign a record like Look Who’s Back. The songs are catchy, the harmonies effective, the riffs riffing—and then they end, and you move on to the next one, only for the whole thing to drift into the air like heat off the desert sands. It’s easy to understand how a young band can become infatuated with influence, but after a decade, there should be something else to grease the engines. Even when they fuss with formula a bit, as on “Sweetheart of the Radio,” it’s merely in service of donning a new mask (in this case a kind of technicolor country bonanza) rather than breaking any new ground. It’s not that the band isn’t earnest in their attempts, it’s that they’re so earnest—so unwilling to even hint at the subversion necessary to make this kind of homage interesting—that it becomes little more than curation.
Maybe it comes as no surprise to learn that The Nude Party’s biggest claim to fame as a band so far is having no less than seven songs featured on the hit Netflix melodrama Outer Banks. I have no doubt that they add something to the scenes of steamy summer love, boiling tension, and, yes, treasure hunting. I’m certain they rock and they roll, bringing to mind freewheelin’ good times, sun-tanned beer swigging, and good ol’ uncomplicated fun. And then, after a minute or so, the song fades smoothly into the background, the The Nude Party along with it, until their next release.
