PREMIERE: Sheen Marina - Travel Lightly

Laura Kerry

With the name Sheen Marina, this Brooklyn-based four-piece seems to like all things sunny and nautical. Chuck Thomas, Justin Mayfield, Michael Karsh, and Steven Bartashev identify their music most often as “surf-rock,” and they followed up their debut EP Coda Arms last year with a cover of the Beach Boys’ song “Gettin’ Hungry.”

As the line drawing of a web-footed monster on the art for that single suggests, though, they also have a tendency to turn a radiant day at the beach into a twisted, savage rampage. Sand, bright towels, and plastic toys remain in the picture, but they are scattered and partially buried under a thick layer of sludge and debris.

In their full-length debut, Travel Lightly, Sheen Marina jumbles their surf-rock with an eclectic mix of sounds, creating music that is challenging and off-kilter, but always tight and intriguing. Songs tend to morph as they unfold, propelled by the play of tension and release, accessibility and dissonance. Opening on “WYSC,” the album gets through about 11 seconds of rattling percussion and pretty synth before the vocal melody hits its first unexpected note and guitars burst in playing an ominous chord progression. Switching several more times, the song also hits moments of noise rock, art rock, and even a hint of pop punk, all guided by the calculated complexity of math rock. And that’s just the first song.

Throughout Travel Lightly, the band journeys to surreal sunsets (“Chasing the orange cream sunset dreams / She's a firecracker,” they sing in “Nose Ring Boring”); tales of California that are equally head-bobbing and hair-raising (“Fever Dreams”); tunes with jangly verses, shrieking choruses, and a hint of Radiohead in the vocals (“Wax Lens”); and glitchy, jittery guitar-driven collages (“Ugly Viper” and others). Sometimes Sheen Marina paints abstract images, as in “Nose Ring Boring,” while at other times, they tackle the modern world and the psyche with poignancy and directness (“I've got to go to the edge of a digital world where I can find my soul,” they sing in “Swipe”).

One thing remains in all those travels: There's always a weird, ominous creature lurking under the surface. Take “Summer Sunshine People,” the track whose title indicates that it might deliver on the promise in Sheen Marina’s name and genre. Sometimes it does—its vocal and guitar melodies offer enough bounce to grasp onto. But at the end of each catchy line waits a different discordant surprise, and the refrain repeats, “Empty, my life is empty.” The summer sunshine people are surprisingly dark and gloomy, but the song still emits a radiant, magnetic energy. Travel Lightly is a trip to a strange seashore, but we suggest you start packing your beach bag now.

VIDEO PREMIERE: Sheen Marina - Coda Arms

Kelly Kirwan

Sheen Marina have fashioned their own Wonder Emporium with their latest single, "Coda Arms," and its corresponding video created/directed by Kohar Minassian. It's a trippy display of knick-knacks superimposed over translucent backgrounds, whose effects teeter between x-ray and neon-thermal vision. Miniature figurines are the forefront, as palm trees, swirling patterns, and even reptilian close-ups act as their canvas. There are tinfoil-twisted astronauts with a single bloodshot eye connecting neck to shoulders, and tiny statues of tongue-lagging dogs drifting happily across the screen.

In a word, it's weird. In another word, it's enrapturing. There's something in Sheen Marina's sound and hallucinogenic logic that keeps you at ease, as if "Coda Arms" were the guide-posts that staved off a bad trip. The Brooklyn four-piece has a mix of surf rock and slight psych-punk influences, which come together and form an unexpected sound—it's jazzy and lo-fi, with an inviting voice pulsating somewhere beneath the melody.

The song starts off dreamy enough before breaking into a semi-familiar rock structure (but not for long). Sheen Marina flutters between quick lapses into staccato drumming, twisting guitar riffs, and then tapers off into an eerie, warbled pitch you would expect to hear while spotting a UFO. It plays like a pinball machine, your attention in a constant state of flux, but still soothed by the game. It's to be expected from a band that's "in love with everything," and whose style shows it. "Coda Arms" also doubles as their EP title, a trifecta of the uncanny an intriguing—an Emporium worth the ticket purchase.