Glo-fi, Cruising with the Top Down

Ah, summer: grass clippings, hazy nights and the eternal pop song. The past months marked the uprising of the skuzzy summer jam, woozy tunes grown in cassette recorders, cheap laptops and a deliberate sense of nostalgia.

Blogs have grouped these songs under a variety of genre signposts, useless monikers like “dreamwave” and “hipstergogic pop,” but the one that stuck is “glo-fi,” as assigned by Pitchfork.com.  The songs warble along to 1980s drum machines, most of them with purposefully low production values, all of them painted in a New Age sound palette.

The micro-genre originated with ironists, no doubt the same group of tastemakers that inexplicably made Chuck Norris popular a few years back, but has quickly grown into its own. The aptly named Neon Indian, for instance, did not even exist a few months ago. But the Texan outfit reached critical and commercial acclaim by riding a wave of hype for the single, “Deadbeat Summer,” four minutes of blissful muzak that exemplifies the genre as a whole.

Like it or not, the movement defined the summer of 2009, and as the season fades to autumn, let us review the songs that paved the way for “glo-fi”:

• Memory Tapes – Bicycle
• VEGA – No Reasons
• Weird Tapes – The Heavens
• Neon Indian – Deadbeat Summer
• Delorean – Seasun
• Washed Out – “You’ll See It”