Sunday Mourners

The site’s littered with records from West Coast favorites Curation, but the latest record from the label shies away from the usual comfort corners of Power Pop and Cosmic Americana. Though hammered and hewn on the West Coast, every fiber of Sunday Mourners’ debut feels like it has NYC in its veins. The band spins through the eras, scooping a Strokes sneer from the outset, waxing aloof on opener “Careers In Acting.” By the time they hit the 12-minute centerpiece “Darling,” they’re deep into the Velvet Underground’s balance of beauty and brittleness. The song swoons and then falls into an extended existential crisis, tearing itself apart over the latter half with propulsive precision. The band use the rest of the record to brush against familiar signposts from The Voidoids to Jonathan Fire* Eater, but more than just reminding the listener of past pantheons, they embrace the discomfited decadence of those bands’ legacies.

A-Rhythm Absolute does more than leave a taste of Television on the tongue, they tap into era after era of chafe and chug it through the amplifiers. The band bends and batters their riffs, happy to scrape the sides of the psyche as they unfurl stories of square peg scoundrels and barstool bravado. Cycles of indie rock chew and spit through the sinewy sounds of the ‘70s but only a few bands in a generation are able to pull off the pout without making it feel like a put-on. Sunday Mourners take up the mantle for the ‘20s, and maybe we didn’t realize how much we needed a new generation of jaded kids carving up the air with jagged guitars and iced invective, but in a year when every every second slices a nerve, it’s nice to have a brick wall of battered riffs to smash into.

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