TENNIS

If you hear Tennis make some references to boats, beaches, or other nautical paraphernalia, it’s warranted. The Denver-based buzz band is comprised of lovebirds-turned-sailors Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. The duo spent their cash on a small sailboat, Swift Ranger, and sailed along the North-Atlantic coastline for seven months. Their resultant debut album Cape Dory, out tomorrow, is a reverby homage and a warm kiss to life on the water. Somehow all that wanderlust produced more than a musical travelogue. Cape Dory is an expressive album of little surprises and touches of sweetness.

Moore and Riley met while both were studying philosophy in college. From the first their friendship, then romance, was focused on sailing. They wrote some joke songs and came up with a joke name (Tennis) while getting their degrees and researching how to sail from their landlocked hometown. “That’s actually the thing we love more than anything, it’s sailing,” Moore says. “If we had to pick music or sailing, we would pick sailing, no questions asked.” It’s an odd thing to say when you’re releasing an album of music, but Moore says they owe their boat a lot.

During the months of coasting between harbors, Swift Ranger became the couple’s home. They left their instruments and most connections to modern culture behind them. Moore started a blog to tell their families that they were still alive, but by the time they hit land, the duo picked up their instruments again to try and give their journey its proper commemoration in Cape Dory.

Moore and Riley, now married (“I feel like I just married myself, only the male version of it,” Moore says), didn’t really figure out they each played music until their sea journey was over. The joke songs gradually gave way to pared-down drifts inspired by ’50s and ’60s radio and timed perfectly to the growing lo-fi, surfwave movement. Tennis kept their joke name, chosen because Moore would tease her hubby about his penchant for playing. “I think almost everything we do stems from a joke and somehow we end up liking the joke so much we take it really seriously,” Moore says. “Like we have tattoos on our arms that were jokes first that we drew and dared each other to get.”

That lopsided sweetness is a hallmark of Tennis’ sound and Moore’s vocals. Cape Dory has a rough, submerged quality to it. Moore’s vocals swoop and overlap with crooned melodies, while Riley’s guitar work is open, echoing simplicity. The playing isn’t especially virtuosic, but his riffs build and seep into each other, playing off Moore’s innocent delivery of lyrics like “We’ve been gone/For so very long/That we’ve forgotten/Where we are from” from “Bimini Bay,” one of the album’s strongest songs along with “Baltimore,” named for the final port of their voyage.

The album, recorded in two and a half weeks, does have a rough edge to it thanks to the absence of a producer or professional sound engineer. Moore and Riley took over the responsibility themselves, wanting to find a raw and natural sound to their production. “It’s hard for me to learn that things can just be natural with the flaws that would be inherent in them as opposed to just sounding sloppy or amateur,” says Moore, an admitted perfectionist. “For our album we wanted it to be a middle ground between lo-fi and hi-fi, between polished and sloppy.”

That honest intimacy laces Cape Dory. Almost half of the songs are named after ports they visited. Tennis avoids rattling off a series of theme songs in favor of delivering a personal history of each stop. It sounds like they had some fun in the upbeat “South Carolina,” whereas the album’s namesake starts with a desire to get away. At all turns you feel like you’re on the boat with them.

The simple production and orchestration mean that Tennis doesn’t have much to hide behind. Some songs rely too heavily on reverb to give the songs a mysterious lift or dive dangerously close to clichés about staring at the ocean floor. Still, these moments give a sense of naïveté to Tennis’ highly competent and genuinely sweet first album.

Tennis is currently on tour, wrapping up at the end with South by Southwest. After that, Moore and Riley plan to pick up Swift Ranger in North Carolina and go back out sailing for the next two months. I hope they come back.

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