Sun Bones - Sentinel Peak
Nearly six years ago we were hunching over laptops in his poorly lit dorm. Sam Golden and I consummated our new friendship with the ethically dubious act typical of college Freshmen: swapping iTunes libraries. Later, we made a more legitimate musical exchange when I found him at the back of the Music Theory classroom hocking his band's CDs for $5 a pop. At the time I didn't think much of my purchase—I considered it an act of charity more than anything—and, full disclosure, I didn't give it a good listen for years. What I had received was Hymns and Lies, the first of three albums which the band produced as Boreas, before the addition of fourth-wheel Evan Casler and their rebirth as Sun Bones in February of this year. The eclectic sounds of H&L reflects the band's insatiable appetite for new means of musical expression, hoovering up techniques from genres as far-flung as hip-hop, musique concrete (Sport of Birds), troubadour song, and punk rock, and spitting them back out onto a low-fi indie garage rock canvas. With a characteristic bleakness, H&L runs the gamut of hormonal highs and lows, at once vulnerable and charming, ecstatic and brooding.
By the release of their Bicycle Built for Tour EP in 2011, the boys were experimenting with more ambitious harmonization and longer melodic trajectories. Where Hymns and Lies reveled in a dry birdshot fever, BBfT fills the gaps with reverb and ethereal post-production effects, lending the EP a new kind of aesthetic unity. As a result, even Owen Pallett's string quartet/loop pedal antics in CN Tower and Click Clock and the Arlo Guthrie-like Cycling song feel at home together. Their second EP, called Kickstarter Songs, is the end result of fundraising gimmickry—echoing the line of custom-made instruments designed out of bicycle parts which accompanied their previous tour—in which donors could propose an idea for a song which the band would then write and produce. The eight commissions (one of which was only later released as a single) are as diverse as the folks that inspired them, ranging from the simple, warbling beauty of Ripple to the unsettled, Yorke-ish intellectualism of Class I. The humble origin of the Kickstarter Songs EP betrays its ambition to new heights of artistic quality for the band.
Aren't they adorable?
So where did the raw heat, 12 bar blues that opens Sentinel Peak come from? With their sound so constantly in flux, Sun Bones' style is difficult to summarize, but in some ways, Sun Bones' stylistic malleability IS their style. Of course, familiar elements bubble up via their DIY ethic, the use of clapping, stomping, and homemade/everyday instruments like egg shakers and tambourines, and their intricate Brian Wilson-inspired vocal harmonies. Voices become instruments as needed: the upward-bending vocals of Love Letter mimics the iconic moog synth heard in the original Kite String Priestess. The band's second full-length album unites punky power chords and vocal unisons, aspects of 60s psychedelia, and the groping, mixed-style musings of Welcome Interstate Managers or Animal Collective. There is a lot of talent evident in the compositional complexity of Old Moons, the wan electric guitar riffs and sedately limping backbeat of which has a Dark Side of the Moon feel to it. Still, as a band, Sun Bones is not afraid to get down on one knee and sing a kitchy song to get the girl. In some ways, I feel like Sam, a former Classical composition major, should be averse to such populist gestures like Kite String and Las Aguas, but admittedly it's difficult to refrain from singing along. With such great material elsewhere on the album, I am tempted to play the part of apologist: Las Aguas oscillates between heavy Ramones-style distortion and a lackadaisical surf-rock haze, and I can't help but hear irony in it's heavy-handed punk chords.
Sentinel Peak gets better towards its middle and end. Like the two sided psychology of Dr. Jekyll, the furiously energetic And Seek occupies two separate worlds, expounding on a simple melodic motif which transforms from minor to major as it is turned upside down. Skeleton's tight lyrical strictures and sparse rhythm guitar aspires to be the next Free Radicals, with a special timbre of music theory geekery. Plucky secco textures and melismatic vocals fill Tunnel Howl, which feels particularly indebted to the Dirty Projectors, whose influence is heard throughout Sentinel Peak in the wild vocal embellishments of Driving Song and later, Earthquake and New Zealand.
Photos by Sarah Trainor, via Facebook
When the anxious subdivisions and pressing bass groove of Driving Song build to their climactic end, the album begins anew, as if transported to another realm. Kamikaze Dream creates a lazy Yeasayer vibe with its dissonant and heat-distorted "in the summer," and sets the stage for the crazy Peter Grimesian drama of Undertow. The acoustic guitar arpeggios of Earthquake harken back to Hymns and Lies album-closer Tired Eyes and give way to a deeply unsettling electronic deconstruction. In conversation over Facebook, Sam told me "we arranged the album in a way that it goes 'deeper' thematically, starting with straight-up fuckin' and ending with spiritual/anti-spiritual revelations." I mentioned that the album gets more complex texturally as it goes on. "Yeah, within songs as well. We try and guide people into weirdness. Like, give a context for it. I think that can be said of the whole album too." I would take it one step further: the concept applies to their entire catalogue, from Hymns and Lies to now, and with the promise of a agreeably heady future.
Because Sentinel Peak is not the end. There is a breathless creative energy to Sun Bones, who appear to have so much to say and so little time to say it. If Sentinel Peak's 14 tracks were a sonnet, its closing couplet form the volta. Offered up are two opposing resolutions to the paradox of humanity, the conflict arising from our search for meaning and its apparent absence in the cosmos. On the one hand, an existential outpouring and embracing of the Absurd; on the other, a call to faith.
We'll never know what brought us here.
Time can't reach us. It won't need us. It can't take us along.
But still I'm called to call Your name
To turn my feet to Jerusalem.