The new album for the Colorado-based indie-pop band Tennis takes cues from the album’s title “Young and Old,” offering forth a return to the old sounds of  its previous record with some new additions. Tennis, for those new to the band, is the pseudonym for the married duo Alaina Moore (vocals, keyboards) and Patrick Riley (guitar, keyboards, production). The group started making music after graduating college, buying a sailboat and sailing along the Eastern Seaboard for seven months. In fact, Tennis’s music is meant to be somewhat of a reflection of that experience. If it’s music actually bears any resemblance to their sailing excursion, I would imagine their trip to be full of sunny weather and wanderlust.
         Tennis’s “Young and Old” is on Oxford record label Fat Possum and was produced by the Black Keys’s Patrick Carney. Carney’s influence is evident on a number of the vocals and riffs on “Young and Old,” which resemble the Black Keys’s sound, most notably on “Petition.” The album also does a good job pantomiming the female jazz crooner a la Ella Fitzgerald. I’m not sure if they employ a jazz-era microphone or just vocal effects, but Alaina Moore’s singing is terrific on the album. This nice, new addition to Tennis’s sound is an important development because it transforms what often came close to resignation or apathy to the impassioned and the soulful. I imagine Carney played a role in this development because the Black Keys have become  influenced increasingly by the sounds of soul music.
         Despite the center-stage vocals, the lyrics fall by the wayside under the vocal effects. On “Young and Old,” Moore’s vocals function more as another instrument adding to the collective sound, rather than as a method of sharing a narrative or emotions.
         The addition of the ’50s doo-wop sound, which resembles the Dixie Cups on some songs and Roy Orbison on others, creates an interesting fusion between Tennis’s lackadaisical surf-rock and the pop music of a forgone era. On “Origins,” the influence of ’50s pop brings backing female vocals to a wall of synthesizers and produces a music that could only be called lovely.
         Changes aside, the album returns to similar sounds and similar themes covered on the last album: jangly guitars, a smattering of tambourines, the beach, one’s dreams. Pounding tom-toms here, carefree lyrics there, Tennis’s “Young and Old” threatens to “All (Feel) the Same” as the last album as the title of the opening track suggests. On the whole, though, resembling its old album is not really a bad thing. Its  “Cape Dory” was a solid album and avoiding the “sophomore slump” on their second album is laudable. And while several of the songs on “Young and Old” are largely innocuous or inoffensive, nothing to get too excited about, the album listened to as a whole will leave you pleased and at ease like any good jangling pop record should. In essence, the album functions best as an unpretentious soundtrack or a backdrop to “Traveling,” to “Dreaming” and to the various frivolous notions of being “Young and Old.”
“Young and Old” was released this month and is available for free on Spotify.