Slime Girls – Vacation Wasteland
For those of you that felt a spiritual connection to your NES or your Game Boy, it’s time to unplug it, load your favorite game cartridge and take it down to the beach. Why would you do that? I don’t know, but Slime Girls sort of convinces us it’s a hell of a good time, whatever it may mean. Rollerskating by the palm trees with Dragon Warrior on your handheld, kissing a cute girl wearing a Donkey Kong t-shirt and neon, pixilated shades, or lying in the sand, looking up at the glowing sunset skies, trying to find clouds shaped like Pokémon? This oddly stylized imagery is captured on Slime Girls’ Vacation Wasteland EP, and as weird as it probably sounds, it paints a pretty cool picture.
Slime Girls has an odd ambition: build summery punk music out of Nintendo-esque bleeps and bloops. This EP is a small but capable contender of the chiptune genre, playing the same game as the likes of Anamanaguchi and Unicorn Kid, who paint their fun indie-pop music in a nostalgic coat of pixels and low-fi electronics, as opposed to your traditional guitars and vocals. On the Vacation Wasteland EP, you can actually hear a distinct Bomb the Music Industry! influence, which comes as no surprise from an album decked with ska/punk tendencies and a distinct summer vibe. You can’t help but be a bit impressed by the fact that the album is 80% the soul of an 8-year old Game Boy addict who would rather catch Mewtwo over summer break than spend it surfing under the hot sun. Through Slime Girls’ love of pulsing video game beats and occasional usage of guitars and drums (real ones), Vacation Wasteland manages to feel like a fitting soundtrack to both the longboarders and the coin-hoarders, and as such serves as a surprisingly functional hybrid of 2 seemingly different sounds.
Though only an EP of things to come, Vacation Wasteland puts Slime Girls on the map of good times in strange places. As Anamanaguchi have shown, this breed of music comes across pretty effortlessly as a source of great potential, and the same can be said about this small package of memorable summer jams. Looking forward to the future full-length debut.
Pick up Vacation Wasteland from the Zoom Lens label at Slime Girls’ bandcamp page:
http://slimegirls.bandcamp.com/
Recently released as a cassette tape, but they are currently sold out (sorry)