Austinist Capsule Review: The El Guapos Birds. Birds! Birds?
There’s this funny little track in the middle of The El Guapos’ EP Birds. Birds! Birds? It’s called “Time Machines,” and it tells the tale of a couple of friends who inadvertently travel to the future and meet their 18-year-old selves (how old the protagonists are at the beginning of the song isn’t revealed, but given that their time machine is a wash tub, they’re probably very young). The narrator is aghast at what he and his friend are destined to become: “We just smoke and never sleep,” goes the lyric, sung over strummy acoustic guitar and blasts from a distant harmonica. The meeting of past and future initiates the character’s decline into teenage malaise, to which the song offers a simple moral: “Don’t play with time machines.”
That’s a suitable heads-up for listeners approaching Birds. Birds! Birds? If you’re not prepared to stare your late-teenage years straight in the face, you’ll probably shudder when the band rhymes “heart” with “heart” on “A Cathedral for the Sun.” But if you’re a casual practitioner of nostalgia, the type who longs for the days where your biggest concerns were finding first love and growing up, you’ll spend a lot of time with these songs. Most worthy of that time are the sweeping, near-perfect “Move to Antarctica” and the mini-suite “Snow Blankets,” which plays like a backyard production of The Who’s Tommy. Birds. Birds! Birds? sets course toward several new frontiers (the sea, outer space, the Antarctic, the future), but the band doesn’t have the means to capture that scope quite yet — studio compression thins out the record’s bigger moments, like the climactic clatter of “Shooting Flares From Ships.” But it is an achievement that The El Guapos can already produce the infinite moments that fuel young bands and nostalgia junkies alike. If only they had a time machine …
