“It’s the year 2025, California has been banished from the United States for water theft.” That’s the first line of The Donkeys‘ futuristic surf-psych concept album Sun Damaged Youth. It’s about a “pack of teenaged misfits armed with skateboards” doing what they can to survive in a radioactive, yet still lovely, desolate landscape. Not only has California been abandoned, but so has most of Earth. The elite have fled to Mars and left the rest of us amid the toxic slime and tortuous heat they helped create.
The opening cut, “S.D.Y.,” is full of lovely Beach Boys melodies mixed with shoegaze surf guitars. 60’s retro organ sounds dominate “Radiation,” as they sing, “On the beach, you’re never out of reach.” Part of the story of this concept album is that the teenage wastelanders are kept sane by radio transmissions from a DJ known as “Cherry Cheetah” on KTOX Radio broadcast from somewhere deep underground. She presents songs like the dream-poppy “Candy Foam” and fictional bands like the Coffin Nails doing a surf instrumental called “Space Slip,” the Savage Detectives performing “Pier Rat” (a bit of a spooky tune with that vintage organ in it), the Santa Anas playing “Pink Seaweed” (an early 1960’s soul instrumental), and The Divine Invasions playing a dreamwave tune called “Weed Wacker.”
“Kool Kids” is shoegaze bliss with bright vocals that still have that distant sound that only shoegaze bands seem to know how to create. “We Are All So Young” is a salute to the point in life where one realizes youth is ending and adulthood is looming. “It’s time to leave the streets behind. I hear the mountains are doing fine,” they say. “Summer’s Dream” is like a long lost Beck cut with its languid beats and vocals as the SDY remember when summer days were spent playing games and surfing instead of scrounging for food and dealing with, as evidenced in the next track, “Green Gunk” that ruins everything it touches. “Unusual” is a short track that floats by you like a feather on the wind. “Sticky Sand” is an upbeat surf rocker that hides a warning about ocean pollution.
“All In the Eyes” brings in Eastern rhythms and guitar sounds (as well as chirping birds, perhaps the first ones seen by the SDY in years) as they sing about idyllic fields and how there’s “no need for disguise when everything’s real.” This is true. When “all the worth is gone, nothing is real,” as they say. This world is illusion. The world of the SDY is illusion, yet its lessons are important. The characters in the Donkeys’ fiction learn that what others see as a wasteland is truly a beautiful, present reality. We’d all be better off if we could see this.
Keep your mind open.
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