Young Costa Rican garage pop quartet Las Robertas released their sweet-but-scuzzy debut album Cry Out Loud in May of 2010, and, in our fast moving world of blogs and noise, they’ve already gotten a lot of attention. Thanks to nods from the likes of Gorilla Vs. Bear and Club Fonograma, they’re taking their mix of girl group pop, surf guitars, and grunge to SXSW 2011 and drawing comparisons to Best Coast and Vivian Girls. To put it in other terms, people liked their album a bunch. One reason might be that while the reverb and washes of sound on songs like “Street Feelings” encircle your ears in a warm embrace, the music never gets lost in the haze.  Underneath the ’90s buzz and ’60s fuzz is a framework of memorable melodies performed with feeling and muscle. In between the harmonizing ooh-oh-o0hs and aah-ah-aahs, are gloomy lyrics about a love that’s faded away. On songs like “The Curse,” The Ronettes collide with Wipers for a mood that’s tender teenage melancholy all the way through. If you want to link them to the sunny crop beach bands we had this year, you’d still have to admit that they’re kind of  a beach band for a day spent alone at a deserted beach where the sun never comes out. But that kind of thing can be waaaay more fun and more intoxicating than its cheerier counterparts. It’s a reminder of the days when everyone was talking about the new sound out of rainy, cold Seattle, which is an odd and likeable quality in a band from a sun-soaked paradise like Costa Rica. To get a feel for them, check out the antique-shop romance/fantasy this video makes of their track “V for You”: Las Robertas – V for you from la GRAN productora on Vimeo.

Photo Courtesy of Las Robertas