Nada Surf: Let Go : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Nada Surf enjoyed a buzz-bin moment in 1996 with the high school satire "Popular," and while the extremely groovy guitar ripples stuck in your head long after the joke was over, it wasn't the kind of hit that suggests a long-term career, as Harvey Danger or the Primitive Radio Gods would be happy to explain to you. So the New York guitar-rock trio hit the indie trail to earn its cred the hard way, and after the Weezer-like introspection of 2000's startlingly great The Proximity Effect, Nada Surf get it all together on Let Go, the band's best by a mile. Let Go is an excellent rainy-afternoon album, full of gentle and melancholic beauty, with echoes of Love and the Beach Boys. In "Blizzard of '77," "Blonde on Blonde" and "The Way You Wear Your Head," Nada Surf show enough smarts and panache to leave most of their Nineties-rock peers eating hot dust.

ROB SHEFFIELD
(From RS 916 – February 20, 2003)