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Fang Island: A Mope-Free Zone

Fang Island's "Daisy" unfolds as a sunny summer jam in which emotion gives way to perpetual motion.
Courtesy of the artist
Fang Island's "Daisy" unfolds as a sunny summer jam in which emotion gives way to perpetual motion.

It takes maybe two seconds for Fang Island's "Daisy" to announce itself as a mope-free zone — a sunny summer jam in which emotion gives way to perpetual motion. Opening with a rich chorus of "oohs," the song announces its intentions right away: to live up to the band's stated wish to sound like "everyone high-fiving everyone."

Like the product of a perfect world in which lots of bands are influenced by Andrew W.K., "Daisy" shares that rocker/icon's love of big guitars, big hooks, big momentum and big expressions of joy. The song just gets more swollen as it goes along, mostly inscrutable but unmistakably cheerful, until it eases into a majestic and lovely coda. Fang Island doesn't have much to say lyrically — at least not in the words that can be deciphered — but it's hard not to hear "Daisy" as a giddy affirmation of W.K.'s belief that life is a party worth crashing.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)