I keep getting excited when I hear of a modern Yacht Rock band, and I keep getting disappointed. Cue disgruntled spiel: “music these days…” But it is true. I am disgruntled, and music these days just isn’t as good.

Young Gun Silver Fox is a team of a young singer-songwriter and an experienced old muso who met on Myspace back when, well, there was Myspace. It’s a cool story, but I don’t think it’s made for a great album.

For those who don’t already know, Yacht Rock is an after-the-fact name for certain adult-contemporary pop music of the mid-70s to the early 80s that featured blue-eyed-soul vocal stylings, sophisticated jazzy chord changes, tight grooves and pristine production. The easiest way to illustrate it is with the Michael McDonald era of The Doobie Brothers, but there’s a whole corner of the internet enthusiastic about whether songs from the era are Yacht or Not. Anyway, it’s some of my favorite music.

Unfortunately, all this modern retro-gazing often is coupled with the modern tendencies to look shallowly at things, and to lazily be derivative. Stranger Things did it with 80s movies, Vulfpeck does it with 70s jazz funk, and The Midnight does it with synthwave culture.

AM Waves gets the production quality component of Yacht Rock right, in that it sounds great. The wrapper is shiny. Meanwhile, meaningless lyrics sail by about it being midnight in Richmond and things vaguely aren’t the same as they were, and banal descriptions like lighting a cigarette get a full two bars to sit with the listener. Sudden music changes appear to derail any nice groove that’s winning you over as if to prove the musical vocabulary these guys have. “Lenny” is a song about having another drink, presumably from a Lenny, sung repetitively in falsetto over various musical tropes. “Take It Or Leave It” just about gets under my skin with the groove and a couple of nice chords until insipid backing vocals come in to repeat every one of the meaningless lines. That’s basically the story for the rest of the record.

Which is sad, because in searching back through the Yacht Rock catalogue (organized, of course, after-the-fact) they’re really not all winners either. So the world does need fresh new Yacht Rock. I’ll be producing some soon, but with my limited budget it might not make the cut on Yacht or Not…