THE GROWLERS
The Growlers | Credit: Pamela Littky
The Growlers make music that mirrors some aspects of life in South Florida brilliantly well. Sure, the band lives and bleeds California-cool, but the disparity between the two worlds is really not so far off that a parallel cannot be made.
As anyone that is both steeped in the lore of the Growlers’ music and has passed through the seedier parts of South Florida’s beach communities can undoubtedly tell you, the band’s songs tell many of the same stories which play out along bars and coastal sprawl of South Florida, simply through the lens of a Californian experience. The dusty, hazy, drug-addled sonic aesthetic that permeates the Growlers’ self-described “beach-goth” sound also feels perfectly suited to the humidity and heat of the region, which has lent a surely backdrop to similar stories of depression and debauchery as those found in the Growlers’ tunes.
The band represents something unique amid the ever-proliferating world of indie-rock tropes, purveying a sound that is retro without leaning too heavily on any one historically relevant genre, the Growler’s music is somehow vague in origin without being bland or basic. Replete with spooky, droning organ, reverb-soaked guitars, a touch of traditional latino influence not unlike that which finds its way into much of South Florida’s music through osmosis, and a crooned delivery via the velvet-smooth voice of frontman Brooks Neilsen, no one really sounds like the Growlers. The band’s music is a celebration of relatable weirdness and darkness that is never forced nor contrived, and seems permanently stuck in a some glorious forgotten tiki bar that exists within an unmade John Watersí film, or a lost Bukowski novel, or maybe a Tom Waits B-side. The ideal soundtrack to night driving through the scenes that happen within the neon-festooned motel jungle that lines A1A and shadowboxes Hollywood Beach, or the drug-addled stretches of forgotten beach the punctuates the more high-falutin’ areas of coastline between Miami to Jupiter.
The band’s most recent release, Chinese Fountain, delivers the goods promised by the band’s critically-lauded past efforts, and elaborates on the Growlers’ sound without abandoning any of its charms. The group will be appearing at Fort Lauderdale’s Culture Room on Tuesday, November 3rd for a night of sweaty, psychedelic-infused beach-goth revelry with Broncho and Heavy Drag. 7:30pm, $15. Things are absolutely certain to get weird.
~ Von Bader
