Summer Games

As excruciating as it was at times, Summer Games required a slow gestation.

Jeff Wickstrom (Junior Bloomsday, Division & Wellesley) and Clint Frazier (Shout Out Out Out Out, Down North) spent a full year sharing musical discoveries and wondering aloud why no one in Edmonton was playing the type of throbbing, hooky electronic pop they wanted to hear.

Finally, after hearing the demos Jeff had been slowly nursing, Clint convinced him that live drums were just what the songs needed to allow justice to be done to these gems in front of an audience.

Summer Games was born.

Proud not to use a laptop on stage, the duo haul around a sequencer, an array of analog synths and a sampler loaded with the 1980’s juiciest analog drum machine sounds. Basslines percolate, pads rise and descend, white noise wooshes and cracks and creamy leads propel a unique brand of pop informed by only the catchiest tidbits of synthpop and electro of the past 25 years – all pinned down by the heavy foot and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them fills of one of the best drummers playing to sequenced drums in Canada.

Wickstrom and Frazier never made a conscious effort to sound like any of their influences, so listing them here wouldn’t do any good. The best indication of a band’s touchstones are the artists that they are compared to by those who hear their music, and Summer Games’ favourite comparison thus far has been “a more modern Tears For Fears with a little Bronski Beat thrown in”.