“Sometimes in the morning, when it’s a good surf, I go out there, and I don’t feel like it’s a bad world.” Kary Mullis
We don’t know much about Electric Peace, except this: “like perfectly good food that is thrown out every day by a restaurant, electric peace flies under the radar to deliver it’s payload of one hit wonders.” And also this: “dinah might or might not. like the dove flying into the sun, it’s inner electric peace.”
Their single “Dinah Might,” sounds like it was recorded in the trunk of your uncle’s 50s Mustang, if your uncle happens to be a vintage car collector. The vocalist sounds like he’s listened to his fair share of Electric Prunes recordings, and the guitar has the aesthetic of an early Garageband experiment. The Peace call themselves “new age surf.” The surf part is easy enough to understand, since there is an actual surf beat propelling the song. Now the new age part, not so much, unless you take into account the Kurtzweil-sounding orchestral sounds that seem to be popping in and out of the arrangment at random. Peace may have skimped on the production value with this one, but the noises are pretty nifty if you’re a fan of 60s surf, Del Rays, or just plain bizarro.
The cover art looks a bit like a billboard you might have seen while driving through a west-coast American city back in the 90s, maybe advertising some mid-level time share property or even just promoting local tourism. Fair enough! We’re assuming that’s not the main focus of the group at this point and they’re happy enough to play some classic psychedelia and surf. This almost sounds like if old school record collectors got together for a jam in a basement after closing down shop for the day. On that note, we leave you with a poem by Francis Duggan:
He Is Surfing Again
He miss the surf beach of the town by the sea
Where he surfed with his mates when younger and carefree
Often tossed from his surfboard covered in the big wave
Nowadays he feels that he might not be so brave
In fancy he can hear the mighty waves roar
As they splash on the volcanic rocks on the shore
His Hometown from where he live may be far away
But great love of the coastal lands in him does stay
In his early forties with a wife and two teenage daughters a decade past his prime
His once brown hair graying and receding he’s showing the wear of time
On our journeys through life destiny has a say
He feels he might feel a stranger in his Hometown today
But in his flights of fancy he is surfing again
And fond memories of what was with him does remain.
