The Ivory Coast - Clouds - Polyvinyl

Review by: Jennifer Perkins

Boston’s The Ivory Coast are an interesting and diverse band, they have so many stylistic irons in the fire its enough to make your head spin. My first impression of the band was their song “Swope” with its Swervedriver-esque distorted guitars on the Polyvinyl sampler, I was thoroughly impressed and very intrigued. It took listening to their latest full length CD Clouds to be completely blown away and enamoured.

The Ivory Coast encompass a myriad of sounds. Sometimes you want to rock out, they can be loud and aggressive. They can sound quirky at times like on the synthesizer peppered opening track "Lake Placid 1986". Other times they are mellow and just plain Indie, at these points you just bob your head. On my favorite song “Traveler” you want to sing along (All this, and they have a vocalist who can sing too!). There are many moods to the Ivory Coast and this is the best part about them.

Don’t bother trying to pigeonhole The Ivory Coast, you can’t. The minute you think they fit nicely under the heading of DC rock, with a Q and Not U type feel they turn their distortion on high and you can hear all the years of listening to Superchunk come into play. The range and scope of The Ivory Coast seems limitless. All at once on Clouds there are Chicago like keyboards, occasional female backing vocals, drums that you could samba to and horns. Rather than coming across like they are spreading themselves too thin you instead begin to wonder if there is any musical style this band can’t conquer. Much like their Polyvinyl label mates The AM/FM, The Ivory Coast have a bad case of musical attention deficit disorder and it works to their advantage.

Clouds is a top notch album. Just when disillusioned cardigan sporting kids everywhere were starting to pontificate about whether or not Indie rock was really dead, a band like The Ivory Coast rides in to town and renews everyone’s faith in the entire genera.

Read where Polyvinyl got their name from here.

Read a review of the Polyvinyl sampler Redirection here.