It’s almost Monday… But it’s the first week of summer, and school is the last thing on my mind. I’m riding my bike down Balboa, muted June clouds giving way to bright blue, and I pass a garage band. To perfect this scene, they’re playing almost Monday’s debut album, Dive.
A San Diego-based indie-pop band, almost Monday, features Cole Clisby, Dawson Daugherty, and Luke Fabry and sounds as if the Beach Boys’ affinity for all things California was written with electric guitar and all the drums I could ask for. Having previously only released singles and EPs, the band dives into album territory with eleven tracks, though the full runtime only totals twenty-eight minutes.
Despite this, the songs don’t beg for more time, each capturing your attention as they chronicle a whirlwind summer romance, touching on each topic only long enough to benefit the pacing of the story they’re telling. This trend of dwindling song lengths has skyrocketed this summer, Sabrina Carpenter’s album being a perfect example of this in both its tracklist and its title, Short n’ Sweet.
Infused with the style of a coming-of-age movie and spurred along with the sudden burst of electric guitar, “never enough” confesses, “I wish I was always recording, ‘cause I like the way you speak,” drenching the listener in the giddy feeling of a first love. “Let’s just pretend, this night won’t end,” “can’t slow down” asks of us, and I cannot help but think maybe the title track explains exactly what this album wants. “I wanna dive in, to a dream that I want to see,” a suspended three-part harmony opens, and the first image of the album is instantly leaving this world and entering another. The allusions to outer space weave through almost half the tracks on the album, coming to a head when Daugherty’s poppy vocals plan to “rendezvous on Jupiter.”
Despite the world of Dive evoking a beachy coming-of-age romance, the indie and pop in indie-pop have separated, with the more indie tracks floating to the top of the tracklist, while pop numbers like Jupiter and Sunburn sink to the bottom. Though it could be a choice in their sequencing, I think almost Monday’s songs that lean further onto the pop side of things are much more enjoyable and should be fronted on an album like Dive.
Trident Magazine put out a poll, and only 15% of replying students said they’d listened to Dive so far. For fans of Bears in Trees or anything on the Heartstopper soundtrack, or anyone looking to cruise down PCH in the late summer sunshine as the chorus of “life goes by” blares around you, almost Monday is definitely worth a listen.
