All Your Summer Songs by Saturday Looks Good To Me makes me realize that I may like 60s era music more than I thought I did. The album was released in 2003 as their fourth album and was published by Polyvinyl Records. Even though it was released in 2003 the influences that it calls upon are 60s centric. Don’t be fooled though, it doesn’t just visit pop, All Your Summer Songs visits some other sounds of the time.
Now the band has a very weird history and many different members so I’m going to cover what I think is the most interesting parts. Fred Thomas is the only constant member in the entire band’s 25 year history (still active from what I’ve read) and is the mastermind behind everything. This album specifically credits a lot of different people because it uses the “Wall of Sound” which was created by Phil Spector in the 60s and majorly influenced pop music at the time. Inspiration is also drawn from Brian Wilson and Motown. It was also interesting to learn that the band was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
There is a grand total of 13 songs on the album but some physical copies do also have a few bonus tracks from what I’ve heard. This album moves around a lot when it comes to the sounds but there are transitions placed throughout the songs to make them more welcome, the most noticeable being being at the end of “No Good With Secrets” going into “Alcohol”. Most of this album has very happy songs with female vocals or very solumn songs with male vocals. I feel like there aren’t really any songs worth skipping, all of them are solid and are able to be different from each other. My favorites from the tracklist is: “Underwater Heartbeat”, “All Our Summer Songs”, Alcohol”, and “Ultimate Stars.”
I like to look at reviews of an album before looking at it so I may be able to look at it in certain ways, I typically ignore their rating because I feel public reviews make people think they are experts. The reviews on this one though were really on the fence and I feel that the one’s writing negative reviews are just wrong, one of them called Fred Thomas’ vocals bad which just is quite the opposite. I’d definitely recommend this album to anyone who likes 60s music in general, it covers all the bases it can, and just sounds sweet.
