“So until there’s a groundswell of support for a Pitchfork-sponsored Blink 182 revival, us former alt-rock listeners are stuck in an awkward situation. First of all, we have no one to talk to about our problems. It often seems like all of our friends spent their early adolescent years immersed in music that still easily qualifies as “good taste” by their adult standards. While we were trying to get our mom to take us to a Smash Mouth concert, they were playing Dvorak in the youth orchestra or diligently combing through their dad’s Bob Dylan album collection. We’re jealous of these friends, not just for sounding more sophisticated than us in conversations about music, but also because they can still love the music of their childhood unreservedly. Meanwhile, we’re stuck on our own, feeling uncomfortable with how much that Eve 6 song whose lyrics we memorized at age thirteen, and which we still kind of enjoy, sounds like a lot of current music we don’t like. We question our tastes and our integrity. Which is why seeing a band-of-the-moment like Surfer Blood perform one of our much-maligned old favorites is not just endearingly unpretentious, it’s also reassuring to many of us. Here, at least, is some kind of bridge between the still-seductive crap you listened to in middle school and the “good” music you listen to now. If I can have a moment of teenage enthusiasm: it feels like they’re singing for me, just for me.”