Album Review: Summer Bodies by Dana Buoy

Akron/Family percussionist Dana Janssen did that by-now routine thing where he took a break from his freak-folk-experimental-rock band to go into the Thailand jungles with a sampler and come home and sit through a hurricane and produce a love album under the name Dana Buoy (conceivably but not actually because he floated around in a lot of rain during this time). The resulting album Summer Bodies warrants more scrutiny than its routine origins suggest. Despite the attention given to the album’s tropical origins and influences, the disc largely is (and largely is its best as) a synth-pop record.

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Dana Buoy‘s regular gig is playing percussion for Akron/Family, the indie rock band steeped in rootsy Americana and folk, injected with a heavy dose of electronic psychedelia. On his debut solo release Summer Bodies, Buoy aims for a more tropical musical climate. There are touches of vaguely Caribbean rhythms working their way throughout much of the album, with thick synthesized beats mimicking bass-heavy reggaeton grooves, as on the opening track, “Anatomy of Now”.

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Trying to capture the essence of summer can be a tricky thing. It’s one thing to evoke memories of what you were doing in the summer of whenever, but it’s another–and much harder–thing to actually transport you back to that time, letting you experience again the feelings and senses of those days. Dana Buoy (aka Akron/Family percussionist Dana Janssen) has made such an album.

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