By Ben Bonadies

I’ll say it. Rock music can be a bit of a bummer. National mood aside, the rock landscape has been trending dour in recent years. With the inevitable bad-vibes fusion of pop-punk and hip-hop topping the charts and guitar music’s newest star firmly in the Sad camp, who will take up the mantle of the lighthearted rockstar? 

Dutch Tulips make a pretty compelling case on their new album, Double Visions, 12 tracks of fuzzed-out power pop, hooky melodies, and chords strummed with audible verve. It’s a blast to listen to, but that’s not to say the album doesn’t have anything on its mind. “It’s a little bit sneaky. It’s like a prank,” says Matt Freake, the band’s drummer. “The goal in general is to write weird music that’s also approachable,” Freake says. The Trojan Horse approach to songwriting is battle tested and effective and Dutch Tulips employ it to great effect on Double Visions. Lead singer and lyricist Jack Holland delivers anxious missives in an acrobatic yelp while the band behind him plays the musical equivalent of a summer kegger. Single “Tell Me Your Codes” has Holland running down a list of things in his life that should be helping but aren’t. “I water the garden, that’s doing nothing for me. I’ll swallow anything that’s doing nothing for me” he sings as a chorus of “Doo-Doo-Doos” and chugging fuzz guitar lift him out of his funk. 

Dutch Tulips by Stanislaw Nagiec

Freake’s answer to the spate of glum rock we find ourselves in is to take it out of the computer and into the real world. “I think music is fun when there’s a little bit of spontaneity to it,” he said. The prevailing wisdom when recording music is to err on the side of sterility. Tune your vocals perfectly, strap everything down to a grid, and let the computer do the work. “It sounds really good but it doesn’t have a soul to it,” says Freake. It’s this reason the band records live in the room, tracking bass, drums, guitar and synthesizers together. The resulting recording feels electric, alive with the energy of a pub band already three beers deep. It leaves Holland plenty of runway for finding inventive routes through a song, like his frequent trips to the high end of his register in “Frozen Orange” and tender cooing in “Better Than a Soul.” 

For Double Visions, the band decamped to Ghost Hit Recording, a converted church in West Springfield complete with a 1,400 sq ft apartment for artists in residence. The space was the missing piece the band needed to put the finishing touches on Double Visions. Freake praised the acoustic quality of the room and the abundance of gear to experiment with. After the bulk of the recording was complete, they began layering organ and fiddling with delay pedals and other juicy bits of hardware that are irresistible to bands like Dutch Tulips. “We’ve vowed to never make a record anywhere else ever again,” Freake said. 

Buy Double Visions on Bandcamp. You can also find the album streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.