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Custard Records
Released: May, 2005 |
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Sunshine
When guitarist/singer Kay (pronounced K-eye), drummer Daniel, and bassist Martin formed Sunshine in a suburb outside the 15th century Czech Republic town of Tabor in 1994, the name of the band was intended as sarcasm.
“When we started we were so hard and fast and painfully aggressive it was a contrast,” says Kay.
Now, with the release of Sunshine’s forthcoming LP, Moonshower and Razorblades, conceived and recorded in L.A., the band has compiled a collection of songs no less heated but less abrasive, informed more sincerely by the rounded buoyancy of the band’s namesake. That’s not to say Moonshower and Razorblades is a sunny album, just more beamingly confident.
“We’re from four season parts of the world,” says Kay, “but I really love California’s constant optimistic weather. It melts frustrations down. It made it better that we could throw open a door after hours of lockdown and get hit by the wide horizon and palm trees. Our songwriting took on a larger, crisper sound.”
There’s more to that imagery than just a cheesy postcard, as Sunshine – now a quartet featuring Kay, Daniel (Drums), Amak (Bass) and Jiri (Guitar) – has thrown open the band’s sound to include an expanse far greater than the group’s beginnings in claustrophobic, chaotic no wave.
“When we started we just wanted our own revolution instead of collecting records and dreaming,” says Kay. “Now we want sounds to interact as much as people.”
Since the post-punk group’s inception as a band fed by an addiction to bands such as Joy Division, the Cure, The Birthday Party, Mudhoney and Material Issue, Sunshine has drawn on layered internalizations expressed with tense dramatic flair, previously documented on Hysterical Stereo Loops, Beats and Bloody Lips, Velvet Suicide and Necromance. Melodies may soar while guitars churn. Like contemporary Primal Scream, Sunshine performs with an intensity almost bordering on painful, yet retaining a dance-friendly element. Moonshower and Razorblades, written with hand-to-the-throat efficiency, shows a marked maturity and growth, and is Sunshine’s most realized release to date.
After years of touring the DIY circuit (They’ve been out with The (International) Noise Conspiracy and recently finished a European tour with The Faint as well as a U.S. tour with Sparta and several split singles with bands such as No Knife, Starlite Desperation and At The Drive-In, Sunshine maximized a bracing sonic wall through a new bassist and the recruitment of an additional guitarist. Building tracks off an often rudimentary loop and a bassline groove, Sunshine achieves an oft-kilter pulse part primal sprawl and part carefully partitioned. Thick swirls of sequencers and pedal-wrapped guitar tones don’t diminish Kay’s driving wail.
The result, Moonshower and Razorblades, expertly pairs the production and programming prowess of Bernd Burgdorf (Spearhead, Tom Waits, Green Day, Pink) with the intuitive chameleon-like versatility of Sunshine. The synergistic effect is a brilliant, densely woven yet nimble hybrid of bedrock-solid arrangements distilled through mercurial expression. The songs of Moonshower and Razorblades – including the serrated sway of “What You’ve Got,” stadium-sized stomp of “Lower Than Low” and stealthy strut of “Neon Religion” (featuring guest vocals by Tricky) – thrust without being overly piercing, pinpointing the light at the end of the tunnel and steadily, stealthily traipsing towards it.
“Sunshine has always been about elemental energy,” says Kay. “Now we can capture that and present it tightly wound, wrapped in more layers than ever before.”
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