Listening to local band Soddy Daisy’s new album Trashtopia, it’s no surprise that they all have a hand in running legendary DIY partyplex Young Camelot, or that the album was partially recorded there. Regal and shambling, I’ve seen some of the stickiest bangers unspool in their cavernous space, all sticky with beer and humid with sweat.

YC is drunk conversations between girls in line for the bathroom, sloppy X’s on your hands, and two people almost fucking on a melting couch. It’s carpet fermented lager and a better populated smoking section than a septuagenarian’s favorite Las Vegas casino.

Trashtopia, from the name, to the cover art, to the sound evokes the bacchanalia and bad decisions, the adrenaline hype and the greyed-out nod-outs. It’s the perfect album to be born in Young Camelot’s messy womb, and I can’t imagine a better place to host the release show this Friday.

The third and forth songs on the album bring restrained lounge vibes and an bluesy growl of an intro, respectively, showing a willingness to experiment beyond the kind of partypunk oblivion I watch three different bands careen through on your average Wednesday night.

WEAK Radio uses the production trope of a scrambled scan through radio land to introduce a torchy doo wop addiction ballad that evokes blue-lit pimple-faced shuffling slow dances and a weary chanteuse draping herself across a Rhodes organ, eyelids slowly closing in resignation.

It’s an album of ambitious length for a self-recorded DIY band. The repetitive dirge When the High Subsides could have clocked in under four minutes (or found a more secure home on an album that promised less shambling and surf), but Soddy Daisy does rollicking lofi pop extraordinary well. I’m charmed with the couplet “Nothing else has ever changed, I’ve got an embryonic brain” on the sunny jammer “Water Cooler.”

Feel free to scream out the names of these songs I’ve described while they play at Young Camelot this Friday. It’s that kind of place, and that kind of band: messy, collaborative, and beautiful.

Evasive Backflip, Rat Hammer, Soddy Daisy, Not For You, Le Tour, Alex Rowney Piano Beast
Young Camelot
Fri, September 18 / $5 / not byob – bring $