Seattle's Boat have made what might be the perfect record for the quarantine, and the early days of its lifting. Tread Lightly, out now via Magic Marker Records, is full of fun, spry, and smart indie-pop. If parts of this sound like the tunes of other American alt-rockers from another era, that's fine, because Boat are referencing the exact kind of thing that soundtracked our youths, provided joy for our growth. For that reason, Tread Lightly seems oddly suited to 2020.
"(To All The) Sweaty People" is part Grifters, part Archers of Loaf, party Sammy, all smart ass hooks stacked up, while "So Many Reasons Your Hair Turns Gray" is brighter still. This is, like many of the tracks here, just the right kind of clever, enough that the overall effect is a happy, not a smarmy one. Elsewhere, "I Believe in the Principle" and "Mind Bending" mine glam rock for big riffs in the same way that Guided By Voices routinely did in the mid-Nineties. That each song is brief like those of Pollard and co. is only fitting.
While Boat are busy sustaining a style that's never really gone out of fashion, they're adding their flavor to it. The wonderfully-titled "The Ballad of Gaz Coombes" doesn't sound very much like the music of Supergrass or its frontman, but it's still an absolutely beautiful mid-tempo number. Recalling Malkmus and Beulah, this one is a gem, as is the buzzing "Zombie State of Mind", one of the selections here, like "Loneliness Kills", that seems thematically suited to this current pandemic-induced state of isolation. That all of this happens over hooks that take me back to the glory-days of The Shins, The Grifters, and Pavement, only makes the entirety of Tread Lightly so pleasurable. There's no dud here, and everything pops with the kind of intellectual, smart-ass snap that was once the currency of American indie-rock. If that makes Boat retro, I don't know. I do know that the band's upholding the tradition of everything I've listened to since 1992 and, for that reason, this gets a rave review from this site.
Tread Lightly is out now via Magic Marker.
More details on Boat via the band's official Facebook page.
[Photo: Press Here Publicity / Boat]