The Sound of a 757 Summer: Turnover's "Down on Earth" Is the Local Record of the Year
Somewhere on a Virginia Beach porch this summer, someone is playing Turnover's new record, and it fits the setting like it was mixed for it. "Down on Earth," released May 29, is the year's essential Hampton Roads album — and the fact that its makers are ours, formed right here in Virginia Beach back in 2009, is the part the rest of the country keeps underselling.
Turnover's arc is one of the great quiet 757 success stories. The band — brothers Austin and Casey Getz with longtime friend Danny Dempsey, later joined by guitarist Nick Rayfield — started in the local pop-punk churn and then did the harder, braver thing: they kept evolving. Album by album they drifted from scrappy emo into the shimmering, reverb-soaked dream-pop that made records like Peripheral Vision touchstones for a whole generation of headphone kids. "Down on Earth" is the sound of that band fully grown into itself — warm, unhurried, gorgeously textured, music that seems to happen at the exact temperature of an August evening at the Oceanfront.
The two singles make the case. "Nightjar" arrived with a video that Turnover's own team framed as a portrait of Virginia Beach — a rare moment of a band pointing the camera directly at the place that made them — and "I See You and Realize" showcases the group's gift for melody that unfolds slowly and then lodges permanently. This is not music that grabs you by the collar. It's music that moves in.
What's striking, and telling, is how the band talks about the work. Dempsey, explaining the album's photographic cover, said he wanted an image rather than a design because "photos stay with me in a more familiar way," adding that "the photo feels like it could be any time in history to me." That's the whole ethos of the record in one sentence — a reach for something familiar and timeless over something flashy — and it's a distinctly un-showy, un-industry way to think, which tracks for a band that came up in a region the industry routinely forgets to look at.
That's the real story here. Turnover could be from anywhere; the press tends to file them under "Virginia band" and move on. But they are specifically a Virginia Beach band, from a scene that has to fight for national attention against Richmond and D.C., and they have become one of the most quietly influential indie acts of the last decade anyway. "Down on Earth" — self-released, no major label in sight — is proof that the 757 doesn't need a co-sign to make music that travels.
Put it on at dusk with the windows down somewhere between the Boardwalk and the Bay. Some records document a place. This one sounds like home the whole way through — which, for a band that never left it behind, is exactly the point.
The 757 exports more than sailors and surfers. Sometimes it exports the best indie record of the year and barely raises its voice about it.
Sources: Turnover announce new album 'Down on Earth' (Our Culture); Turnover announce new album Down on Earth (Alternative Press); Turnover (Wikipedia))