Album Review: Washed Out – Life Of Leisure EP

I’m deathly afraid of sharks (mamas, don’t let your kiddies alone with Jaws when they’re young and impressionable), which means of course that I don’t venture out into the surf much if I can help it. However, the weather here in the greater DC metro area has been so disgustingly, abysmally, horrifyingly hot and humid lately that the cover of Ernest Greene's, better known as Washed Out’s Life Of Leisure EP makes me want to be that girl, floating along in a glassy sunset sea, preferably while the sharks are otherwise engaged and Washed Out is playing somewhere on a stereo nearby. This EP is a damn fine way to take the edge off the summertime, my sweets, from the very first breath to the last. It takes those hazy crazy days of summer and mixes and undulates and sleeks them into something effortlessly, breathtakingly beautiful.

“Get Up” is a slow, dreamsicle of a song, hithering and thithering along on a placid rhythm, as cool as the other side of the pillow. If possible, “New Theory” is even cooler, icy beats and presenting itself as a perfect party-by-the-beach-fire song. Or the perfect lounge-by-the-pool-while-double-fisting-frozen-drinks kinda song. You get the idea. It’s all things lovely and summerproof. Things keep drifting along gloriously with “Hold Out”, which at three and a half minutes clocks in as the EP’s longest song. “Feel It All Around” has an air of back in the day to it, a song that certainly lives quite a life of leisure. Yet again, the downtempo meander hits the spot. “Lately”, well, that’s another hotdiggitydog song. And “You’ll See It”, friends, if you haven’t already heard it, is nothing short of hypnotic. The liveliest of the songs, it is just about perfect in every way. It’s so good you just might end up listening to it for hours, over and over and over and over. And yes, I am speaking from personal experience.

Sweltering temps regardless, Washed Out has hereby produced one of the finest damn EPs of recent memory. It’s new and old and fresh and clean and hot to trot and ice cold. I suspect I’ll adore this collection of songs just as much in the dead of winter as I do today, in the midst of the sizzle of late July. I love it so, and you might just love it too.

mp3: New Theory (Washed Out from Life Of Leisure) (song removed by request, sorry kiddos. Don't blame us.)