The Red Elvises - El Niño
I love this song, it’s in my daily random playlist.
I have this CD collection of various artists. I don’t think many of them are famous, but they are all good. Couldn’t find a downloadable copy but I didn’t look very hard. It’s called Beyond the Beach:
The Blue Stingrays (featuring Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench and Ron Blair)
Agree with Dick Dale, the Mermen (great spacy instrumentals) and Los Straitjackets (though they are not strictly speaking surf-oriented).
Other fine practitioners of instrumental surf rock or that overlaps with the surf genre are Laika and the Cosmonauts and the Aqua Velvets.
Do not miss the Reverend Horton Heat’s “I Can’t Surf”.
Man or Astroman? is another surf rock revival band worth checking out. For a sample, here’s their cover of Goldfinger and Taxidermist Surf.
From surf rock’s first wave, Jack Nitzsche’s The Lonely Surfer.
How about a little Link Wray?
The classic: “Rumble” There’s a short interview with Link about how he wrote it as well.
Is there some reason why no one has yet mentioned the Beach Boys in this thread? I’d have thought a number of their sons to be obvious mainstays of any surf-rock playlist, but over a dozen posts in this thread have yet to offer those, maybe someone can explain to me what I’m missing here. The OP didn’t explicitly exclude them that I can see.
Surf music usually describes a genre of guitar-centric instrumentals with plenty of reverb and tremolo; not music ABOUT surfing like many Beach Boys songs.
All the good ones are taken, so I’ll throw out Best Coast. Lazy, slacker West Coast surf music.
Dawn Patrol - Eliminators The eliminators Dawn Patrol - YouTube
That led me to The Trashmen covering “Miserlou”.
If you’re going to plug quirky Russian surf-rock bands, why not The Red Elvises? I see Face Intentionally Left Blank already linked to “El Niño”, so let me instead direct everyone to their rendition of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance № 5, which I enjoy much more.
34 posts and no one has yet raved about the musical genius of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet?
You all may already be familiar with “Having an Average Weekend”, which served as the theme tune to The Kids in the Hall, but lots of their other songs are just as good. I particularly like “Bennet Cerf” and “Our Weapons are Useless”.
Ooooooo! My favorite genre of instrumental music! I’ll throw a few in no one has mentioned:
The Belairs - Squad Car
The Hollywood Persuaders - Drums A Go Go
The Bomboras - Third Star To The Left
The Centurians - Bullwinkle Part 2, Comanche and Intoxica - That record rules. Every track sounds great, and it’s so loose I have no doubt that the whole thing is recorded live, even if I doubt the claim it is done on UCLA’s campus.
The Vice Barons - Fuzzy 'n Wild
The Mummies - The Fly (most dynamic organ player, with some bad words at the end)
One band that’s like the Pixies - not really a surf rock band, but there’s a hell of a lot of surf rock in them - is The Oh Sees - Tidal Wave. However, they’re as likely to veer off into stoner rock or their own particular melding of new wave, surf rock, stoner rock, and actual metal. They’ve got around 21 albums out as of this writing, so you could just listen to them for a few days without repeating.
Other surf rock groups to check out: the Aqualads, the Atlantics, Supertones and Insect Surfers. All good but to me a cut below the Mermen and Los Straitjackets.
Dang, but a brief search turns up a bunch of newer bands for me to investigate (including an all female group called “Daddy Issues”).
Well, because I don’t know the Red Elvises and Messer Chups (and predecessor Messer für Frau Müller) has been one of my favorite bands for almost two decades.
Be sure to check out Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughan tearing up “Pipeline.” Amazing!
Yeah, if we’re going surf-music-influence-in-Indie rather than straight-up surf, the OP may like MGMT - It’s Workling. Definitely reminds me of a more lushly produced Pixies surf-influenced tune.