Summer of the Shark, the

This is the solo project of Mac McCaughan, formerly of Superchunk and co-owner of Merge Records. Songs vary from sad acoustic pop to more rockin’ noisy tracks. At times, the indie rockin’ songs are very similar the Elephant 6 bands. I’m not crazy about this album, but there are still some decent catchy songs here. Note: There is a static-like metronome in tracks 3-13 that may be a CDR encoding glitch. It might be intentional because sometimes it works well, but I’m guessing that this is not what it’s supposed to sound like. 3, 6, 10, 8, 1

1. starts as acoustic duet, then becomes a lazy sweet pure pop song
2. slow acoustic pop with a sad tension that doesn’t ever break
3. catchy and upbeat rock, noisy and fuzzy guitars
4. midtempo groove built around static-y metronome
5. lazy pop with continuing static-y metronome
6. piano, horns, sweet vocals. slow ballad.
7. upbeat, catchy pop song fitting to elephant 6
8. midtempo sad acoustic pop
9. starts as slow acoustic, then becomes upbeat catchy groove
10. catchy midtempo indie rock a la elephant 6.
11. quiet sweet acoustic number
12. lazy acoustic rock song with a lot of falsetto
13. distant piano