REVIEW: High Plains Drifters — Summer Nights (SINGLE)
The High Plains Drifters’ new single is Summer Girl (Redux). It is ingenious and bizarre, in the wildest sense. A conglomeration of non-consumer-friendly tapas assembled into an immensely catchy song reminiscent of the golden age of popular music, a la Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, China Crisis, or The Outfield. It incorporates an interesting smorgasboard of current pop trends, married with this really disonant sound. Reeking of cult potential, I thoroughly enjoyed their sexy, scary, creepy, and funny aesthetic.
URL: https://high-plains-drifters.com/
It has this deliberate weirdness eeking out of the edges that’s honestly delicious. In a profound sense, they’re representative of a growing trend in the internet music algorithms of artists who can self-represent and build fanbases based on content they curate entirely by themselves. The music industry has always had a close relationship to the moviemaking community, and if what has happened to the latter in the last two years is any indicator, establishment products are starting to have their exclusivity be in doubt. We’ve yet to see someone beat the corporate behemoths’ wide reach, but we’re getting there. The return of the genuine artist to the music market(s) is only a massive strike away, High Plains Drifters indicative of quality underground entertainment breaking into the sun.
Summer Girl (Redux) is deliberately unpolished, musically and visually (in the music video) striking an equivalent to the ‘uncanny valley’ effect. There’s something so delightfully off-kilter about the music, something calling to mind an era when leading men and music personalities didn’t need a perfect smile, a perfect tenor, and an electronically manipulated beat to have a singular impact on the culture. High Plains Drifters frontman Larry Studnicky revealed in an interview with Music Existence this is not a coincidental, creative tendency. Rather, it’s a deliberate choice, backed by the fact Studnicky approaches High Plains Drifters’ musical slate not just as a musician, but as an artist collectively. “There is a difference between artists that inspire me and artists that clearly have influenced my songwriting style.
Being an older artist myself, I am inspired by almost anybody who has had a decades-long career in music — Bowie, The Stones, Green Day, Weezer, LL Cool J (I was once part of his legal team), and Cher (who I met on the first recording project I was involved with),” he stated. “Top influences would include some of the 1970s soft-rock ‘storytellers’ like The Eagles, roots-rock and country-rock acts like The Traveling Wilburys and The Marshall Tucker Band, and new wave acts like Elvis Costello, New Order, The Police, The Psychedelic Furs, and Blondie.”
Through these sorts of inspirations, High Plains Drifters have this ability to both tip their hat and approach their influences with a collagist perspective. However they simultaneously are able to take said influences and make them their own. It’s a precarious balance that sometimes backfires spectacularly despite the best of intentions. But High Plains Drifters, like their cult potential christening, avoids this with gusto, style, and a sense of genuine self-assuredness. That is something, aside from the listening pleasure, to be commended professionally.
Colin Jordan
