Download: Mainsail – “Clean Line”

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(from the self-titled, self-released album Mainsail available on Amazon, iTunes, and Velvet Blue Music) 

Mainsail makes the kind of music that could be described as “soaring,” and they themselves describe it as “Indie Rock for the Soul Surfer.”  But there’s a little saccharine in that rushing water, and more than a little sun on that surf: songs such as “Clean Line” and “Wilson Pacific Ocean” are sweet, escapist odes to the ocean, and in fact, nearly every song on the album ties into So-Cal’s skies and waves, whether directly extolling their virtues, or using them as metaphors for happiness, sadness, love, and abandon.
 
Maybe it’s just because he recently escaped from Chicago’s icy gales, but in his infatuation with our famous coastline, singer Joel C. Bennett lets our famous undertow carry his songwriting out to sea sometimes,  drowning songs such as “Wilson Pacific Ocean” in trite, predictable lyricism: “Let’s go to the hoooo-cean, and we can cast our cares away…”  Where, we ask knowingly, do we cast such cares?  “Into the sea!”  Of course!  The Pacific is already so full of broken syringes and Palos Verdes Estates sewage, why not throw in vague metaphors as well?
    
To be fair, Bennett’s lingering, Band-of-Horses-esque almost-falsetto works a lot better in arrangements with true Beach Boy harmonies, such as, well, “Better Days.” And the beachy love and aural references to surf rock actually attain a kind of plaintive cohesion in the last track on the album, “Wave Hymn.” Though Bennett is singing about an endless wave, the layers of slide guitar and percussive backing vocals make it one you actually want to ride.  If only the surf wasn’t so dead on the rest of the album.

-Ayse Arf