Super Water Sympathy

A busy year ahead for Super Water Sympathy: the band is hitting the road in support of their second full-length, Hydrogen Child, and then picking up a couple months of Warped Tour road work that will carry them through midsummer. After that, they’re talking Europe and possibly Asia. This is a very new band, but you may have heard them last year when they passed through on their first Warped outing. “New music you can trust” is how I sum up the whole Super Water Sympathy experience. They sound a tiny bit like Coldplay, but you can blame that on their producer, Cam Blackwood, who has produced and mixed Coldplay and Morrissey records in the past.

SWS, a five-piece from Shreveport, LA, came about in 2010 as the result of some college jamming. They are brothers Billy and Claude Hargrove, Ryan Robinson, Jason Mills, and Ansley Hughes. The band is competent but not compelling. SWS survives on Hughes’s ability to break it out and connect. If she even had a twinge of yodel in her singing, I’d bag her with Martha Davis, vocalist for Los Angeles band the Motels.

But the mystery to me is how modern indie and punk bands sound homogeneous no matter the geography. In the day, New York begat art rock, Philadelphia bred soul, Seattle was a laboratory for grunge, Southern rock came out of the “red states” in the South, and the West Coast was a wellspring for surf rock. Those days are over: Cincinnati punk matches OC punk, and indie is rarely tied to any one area. Since so little of the South shows up in their music, SWS sound as if they could be from anywhere, really. And another thing — the amount of industry attention SWS has gotten tells me it no longer matters what you name your band, so long as the songs work.

Hands and Social Club also perform.

Super Water Sympathy: Soda Bar, Sunday, May 19, 8:30 p.m. 619-255-7224. $8.