Massage

Massage

Oh Boy

Mt. St. Mtn.

***REISSUED!!! Originally released in 2018 by Tear Jerk in Australia, features members of PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART. "More than anything else, Oh Boy is a celebration of teenage fandom and friendship. Each song is 'about' something else, of course: a betrayal, a breakup, new love, parenthood. The usual stuff. And we’re hardly teenagers. Yet somehow MASSAGE feels like the kind of band you were in back in high school. We were friends first. We all had other lives. We started playing music almost by accident. We made a playlist of songs we loved—hundreds of them—long before we recorded anything: the Feelies, the Go-Betweens, East River Pipe, the Lemonheads, the Breeders, Flying Nun, Sarah Records. ALEX and ANDREW started writing songs the way kids do—to sound like their heroes. No matter how we tried, though, the songs—half Alex's, half Andrew's—came out sounding like 'Massage': scrappy, catchy, minimalist, and sincere, with GABI's harmonies elevating each track. Every Monday after practice, we went to Jay’s Bar for beers and poutine. There was no point to any of this. We were just having fun. Then one day we realized we were a band. Oh Boy is our attempt to capture this easy alchemy on tape—the strange magic of a bunch of amateurs coming together, finding their own wavelength, and making something out of nothing." Pressed on two-color (black and milky clear) vinyl.

Massage

Lane Lines

Mt. St. Mtn.

***Just a few months after releasing their acclaimed second album Still Life, Los Angeles indie-pop band Massage returns with Lane Lines—a six-track EP on Mt. St. Mtn. (Cindy, Flowertown, Blues Lawyer) that finds the quintet expanding on their Sarah-meets-Creation Records sound with new touches of soft psychedelia, Feelies-ish frenzy and Haçienda-era escapism. The band didn’t plan to follow Still Lines so quickly. But after the pandemic further delayed that multi-year project, Alex Naidus (guitar, vocals, former Pains of Being Pure at Heart), Andrew Romano (guitar, vocals), Gabrielle Ferrer (keyboards, percussion, vocals), David Rager (bass) and Natalie de Almeida (drums) leapt at the chance to make music together again in real life and started gathering on random summer evenings in the tiny rehearsal-space studio of producer-composer Andrew Brassell (Susanna Hoffs) with no clear goal in mind. Lane Lines is the surprise product of those informal sessions—a flash of pent-up creative energy that serves as both a companion piece to Still Life and an exploration of textures and influences that didn’t quite fit the full-length but have always been deeply embedded in the band’s DNA, with new echoes of 1980s artists that sought to refract the 1960s through their own skewed prisms: Flying Nun, the Paisley Underground, The Feelies covering The Beatles, “Second Summer of Love” New Order.

Massage

Still Life

Mt. St. Mtn.

***Massage was supposed to be low-stakes, no big deal—"anti-ambition," as Andrew Romano, guitarist and vocalist, put it. The L.A.-based jangle-pop group's first album, 2018's Oh Boy, was a sweet and simple weekend warrior's affair, or more specifically, an every-other-Monday one, as the band members—Romano, ALEX NAIDUS (ex-PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART), GABRIELLE FERRER, MICHAEL FELIX, DAVID RAGER, NATALIE DE ALMEIDA— gathered to bash out songs that offered messy but heartfelt tribute to their chosen heroes: The Feelies, the Go-Betweens, Twerps, Flying Nun. The kind of music Massage makes—sunny, bittersweet, tender—is less a proper genre than a minor zip code nested within guitar pop. Indie pop, jangle pop, power pop—whatever you call it, pushing too hard scares the spirit right out of this sweet, diffident music, and Massage have a touch so light the songs seem to form spontaneously, like wry smiles. Still, on their sophomore effort, Still Life, they manage to take a quantum leap forward in songwriting, production, and depth, all somehow without seeming to try. These 12 deft songs are full of late-summer sunlight and deep shadows, pained grins and shared jokes, shy declarations of love and quietly nursed heartbreak. Still Life resurrects a brief, romantic moment in the late-'80s, right after post-punk and immediately before alt-rock, when it seemed like any scrappy indie band might stumble across a hit. The result is the finest batch of songs they've ever produced—these are gold-standard indie-pop gems from emerging masters of the form.The lyrics are downcast, empathetic, and quiet,...