The rain is just pissing here today. We're surrounded on all sides by this lingering, cold piss of a day. It's the kind of day that means nothing to you. You regard it with utter scorn and wish that you could do anything to distance yourself from it. You'd do it immediately, if you could, but you look at it and you're positive that it's going to be following you around until the day darkens. Even then, if the lights were to magnificently turn back on, the night would prove to you that the gray skies were still there, just cloaked, but still effectively stubborn and pissing. It's one of those days that's bookended by days that are nothing like it, days that were actually as lovely as they could have ever been. You're sure that days like these are practical jokes of some kind or another and you're not laughing.
When you listen to the San Francisco-via-Santa Rosa band Teenage Sweater on an afternoon like this, you can feel them helping somewhat to cure your blues, but they're not trying too hard. They're not giving it their all to make you feel better. You're still looking out the window at the beach and believing that if you were to take your shoes and socks off, that sand would be colder than hell and you'd be retreating back into the house not even ten seconds later, finally resolved to curl up with that book or that pooch, like you should have done in the first place.
Mario Armando Ruiz and Connor Alfaro write these dream pop songs with low resting heart rates. They wander up to us and never over-do it. The songs just unroll easily and steadily, giving the feeling of shaky youth as it deals with a pisser of a day, of an overcast month and of abandoning it all.