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Albums Indie Rock Psych-Pop Surf-Rock

Tourist Activities’s Off My Mind perfectly captures surf-rock

Release date: March 15th, 2019

Dan Ray March 15, 2019
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Tourist Activities’s Off My Mind perfectly captures surf-rock March 15, 2019

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo courtesy of Tourist Activities

Off My Mind, the first full EP from Tourist Activities, starts off with a literal bang. In April 2018, the band released Inchworm, a demo set of seven songs, most of which have been re-recorded and remastered into Off My Mind. “Crystal River” opens each collection, but, whereas, on Inchworm, the track begins with the light clicking of percussion and a softly strummed guitar, the Off My Mind version dives right in with a hard cymbal crash and an immediate vocal line. It feels somewhat akin to having gone to bed in your own home and then waking up lying on the floor in a Seattle garage in the middle of some band you don’t know’s practice. It’s jarring, but you’re not really upset about it.

Being dropped into the thick of it oddly works for this indie-surf-rock foursome. More typical of heavy rock bands, that technique normally puts the listener on their toes, but Tourist Activities, rather, plops you into the lines between. The whole EP has a somewhat shoegaze-y feel, so instead of the compression rampant throughout metal that hits you in the face like a non-caught fish at Pike’s Market, “Crystal River” more makes you feel like you’re standing on a magical piece of staff paper, lollingly grasping at the notes floating off the page.

Frontwoman Bailey Melton’s vocals, *ahem,* melt into each tune; a lot of the words are semi-unintelligible but still fall together into a comprehensive picture for each song. Her voice feels like it’s dripping superman ice cream all along the tracks, just watching rainbow pools form underneath her. The pools reverberate with every stroke from drummer Chris Glaser and with every pluck and strum from guitarist Kell Jacobson, whose lines coalesce with Melton’s vocal melodies throughout the EP like the hands of hockey players after a game: unified, but still unique.

The guitar work here, from both Melton and Jacobson, is really quite impeccable. It makes this album. Off My Mind truly embodies the “surf” of “surf-rock,” with rhythmic guitar sections throughout each track that grab attention and make you feel like you’re really sitting on a pier in Santa Monica, rubbing your toes in the sand, the sun on your back, watching kids roll by on skateboards, roller blades, and retro bicycles, maybe using your tongue to lick up the rolling streams of ice cream about to cascade down the back of your hand.

Because all of the songs on Off My Mind follow this general framework of somewhat-indiscernible lyrics paired with compelling, oscillating guitar lines, no one track really stands out as the clear frontrunner. But, no one track stands out as the clear loser, either. Each of the six tunes is wholly distinguishable from the others while also jiving together to form a true work of cohesion — even though this EP is a conglomeration of an old project mixed with a new one.

The aforementioned “Crystal River,” along with “Greenwater,” “Calamine,” and “Hatchet” — from which the title of the EP comes — also appeared on Inchworm, but second track “Sauce” and finale “Swim,” were newly recorded for Off My Mind. As opposed to the gung-ho start of “Crystal River,” the almost-five-minute-long “Swim” closes the album with Melton’s hypnotic repetition of “sink or swim,” followed by a slow fade-out of guitar distortion. Instead of starting with a bang, we’re ending with the slow crawl of the ocean waves as they slowly drag the shoes you left sitting on the sand out to sea — you didn’t notice the tide flowing closer to shore because you were too focused on lapping up the sweet sugar milk running down your fingers.

Oh well, better get that off your mind.

Off My Mind

Off My Mind
9.7

Production

 10.0/10

Instrumentation

 9.3/10

Cohesion

 9.6/10

Mixing

 9.9/10

Comments

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).