The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
Sundayclub’s self-titled debut is a remarkably consistent, focused and enjoyable dream pop long-player.1
The Winnipeg-based duo’s first album is a glimmering constellation of effervescent influences observed through an artfully Vaselined lens to create something that’s broadly familiar yet distinctly different from its raw inputs. Still, fans of Alvvays, Clairo, Metric, Wild Nothing and Slow Pulp will have an especially easy time finding a lot to like in Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre’s glimmery grappling with young adulthood’s highs, lows and anxiety-riddled in-betweens.2
Some debut albums are overstuffed kitchen-sink collections that serve as showcases for everything a project could conceivably be. Others are EPs that have been kneaded and stretched to fill an album. SUNDAYCLUB splits the difference at a light, but not insubstantial, nine songs that show some variation in style while mostly staying within sundayclub’s dreamy wheelhouse.
That means lots of shimmery synths, ripples of reverb-heavy guitar, clicktrack-y percussion, airy-yet-expressive vocals from Carmichael, and key changes coupled with swelling instrumentation that send tracks on a Roman-candle spiral skyward. There are some minor stylistic departures, such as “Sober, which is a suitably bummed-out addition to the I’m in a Love Triangle with a Mind-altering Substance subgenre, and “Blue Wave,” which ups the urgency and features a crunchier, shoegaze-adjacent guitar texture, but no major surprises. This does slightly flatten SUNDAYCLUB’s charms over a full listen, but the album never turns into a slog, and sundayclub make sure it finishes strong.
“WOYM?,” which closes the album, is a nostalgia-laced slowburn that starts with humming ambience and the sounds of a tape clicking into place and spinning to life before revealing itself to be a Belinda Carlisle-level power ballad as synths ring out and Carmichael asks the semi-titular question, “what’s on your mind?” A fun fakeout, fadeout before the track jolts back to life adds to its stature as a grand finale. As a nifty bookend to the song’s sound effect-featuring opening, “woym?” warps and wobbles as it ends in a way that will sound familiar to anyone who lost a well-loved cassette to a hungry tape deck.
It’s a track that manages to simultaneously look back while maintaining forward momentum and stoking a creative spark. While it would probably be gilding the lily to stretch the resto media motif to an album-length concept, but as a single song, it’s a perfect bow on a mighty fine debut.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
This week I'm breaking format to rank the albums I've written about this year.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Superstore, Season One, Episode Six, “Secret Shopper”
“Think the screen froze.”
“Nah, he just stays like that for like, twenty minutes.”
“How do you get especially fired?”
“That was a hurtfully exaggerated ‘really’.”
The back and forth about ducks was hilarious, I just couldn’t write it down fast enough.
I’m actually really enjoying the white guy new guy protagonist being totally dedicated to being the best at the job. It’s a nice change of pace for this sort of thing.
“Yeah, that was cute and funny.”
“Yeah, that’s why his nickname is ‘The Rapist’.”
“Wait! Bed, Bath, And Beyonce!”
“I don’t think I need a death certificate to buy a condolence card.”
“Oh right. You were saying something that is true for you.”
Favourite customer: the woman looking in the pants of a mannequin.
“Turns out they had a meth lab in the basement, which was a front
Whistle and I’ll Come to You
A British made-for-TV short film, technically part of the anthology show Omnibus but going on to inspire the separate anthology show A Ghost Story for Christmas, which would indeed air a ghost story every Christmas (or thereabouts) for most of the ’70s. This is a chilly adaptation of an M.R. James classic–possibly the most anthologized of all his works?–and in a grand horror tradition, it gives you an elevated eccentric (Michael Hordern), very confident in his own rationality and knowledge, and then rips both his surety and his sanity away from him. This feels crueler than most of those takes because Hordern plays Parkin as a degree or two askew from the world anyway, not a master of it but an oddity to it: he’ll get insufferable over the breakfast table if you effectively ask him to, but otherwise he just wants to mumble and take his walks and do a kind of harmless echolalia, but the supernatural, of course, does not give a shit about any of this, and that’s nasty but believable. He finds an old whistle near a gravestone, cleans it up, sees a Latin engraving for, “Who is this who is coming?”, and then blows the whistle anyway, so it really is all his own fault.
The stop-motion of how the ’70s had to manage a moving bed sheet is far more haunting than smooth CGI could be: the slight herky-jerky quality adds to the eerieness. Very nice, atmospheric work if you like James’s particular mode, which I do.
Went to a screening of this last Christmas and loved it so very much. It feels more distinctly eccentric and borderline experimental than most of the other BBC Ghost Story stuff I’ve seen (aside from possibly Schalcken the Painter), in entirely good ways. “Mmm, delicious breakfast [indecipherable muttering]” has oddly become one of my most quoted lines of dialogue ever since, haha.
I’m looking forward to watching more of these, but I know this may have set a very high bar. The mood and the art of it are just superb.
I haven’t seen that many yet (and I will only watch more around Christmas, I get weirdly traditional about this stuff!) but the ones from the classic era seem consistently strong even if they fall into more traditional ghost-story territory.
I’ve picked up several collections of Victorian Christmas horror stories that I’m going to try to read around Christmas this year. This is the English tradition I most want to catch on in America.
Should watch this as a fan of James’ antiquarian horror – I know it’s considered a British classic for a reason.
It’s on Shudder! Along with a lot of the other Ghost Story for Christmas entries, which was a very pleasant surprise for me.
Elementary, “T-Bone and the Iceman” – A woman is found both dead and flash-frozen so the search is on for someone with a lot of refrigerants driving them around in a white van. The mystery involves, among other things, a dead people cryonics facility owned by Mark Maroglis, a terminally ill indie filmmaker (Patrick Breen), and Torgo. Really. The culprits gave a description of the killer that was based on Torgo. Has anyone told Best Brains? Solid weird mystery, apparently filmed during a cold snap, but Sherlock cannot be bothered with a hat. I hear deerstalkers are warm.
The Twilight Zone, “And When the Sky Was Opened” – Well acted and well made but really hard to get through. More to come.
Ooh, “And When the Sky Was Opened” is one of my favorites of the purely uncanny episodes, so I’ll be curious to hear more of your thoughts on Thursday.
Elementary really should have put Sherlock in a deerstalker at some point, but I don’t think that happened in any of the episodes I ever saw, at least.
Taxi Driver – I’ve only seen this once before and was kinda hoping that a screening might be as revelatory as some of the other restoration / anniversary stuff I’ve been able to see this year. I found myself still in pretty much the same place on this one though, I have no beef with its status as a Great Movie but it’s not one of the Scorsese films that really speaks to me personally. De Niro is obviously great and it’s up there with the best Sleazy New York movies, the nighttime cinematography and Bernard Hermann score are fantastic, the supporting cast is superb etc. It just never quite fully captivates me in the same way some of the other big Scorseses do.
I’ll say the middle act’s pacing is surprisingly slack for Scorsese as I remember.
Glad to know I’m not alone in being more appreciative, than emotionally connected, to TAXI DRIVER. Honestly, I’d say that, with the exception of THE LAST WALZ, Scorsese’s streak from this through THE KING OF COMEDY feels too psychologically hermetic and unrelatable to me, and I’ve always been a bit surprised by the powerful identification that a lot of cinephiles have to it
I’ve only seen King of Comedy once but I got a lot more out of that one, for whatever reason. Raging Bull remains my least favourite Scorsese so I’m certainly out of sync on that one, I just didn’t find anything about it compelling despite obviously admiring the craft. And I still need to see New York, New York and Last Waltz at some point (Blank Check covering his filmography will probably prompt me to fill at least a few blind spots).
RAGING BULL’s point of view is very subjective and immersive, whereas KING OF COMEDY’s style is more ironic and objectively detached, even when depicting Rupert Pupkin’s fantasies. La Matta’s rage and propensity for violence provides a perfect subject for exploring the inseperability between the protagonist’s profession and personality, but I don’t think Scorsese’s sense of showmanship, while magnificently executed, draws us into the fighter’s soul in the way that it was intended. I find it a bit show-offy and off-putting. That isn’t as much of an issue for me in NEW YORK, NEW YORK or KoC, where a sense of distance between audience and character is the point. I find these films unsatisfying for different reasons (as does Scorsese, apparently).
In relation to Tristan’s essay yesterday, one can also explore the relationship between job and personal expression in the early stages of DeNiro and Scorsese’s collaborations. but I’ll have to mull over that for awhile.
Live karaoke! Did Bowie’s “Golden Years” – didn’t know it was the full album version so I was stuck doing the “wop wop wop” bit at the end for two or three minutes. My friends meanwhile did “Just What I Needed” and one did a killer “Chantily Lace” as a jokey serenade to his wife.
Tales From The Crypt, “Abra Cadaver” – Tony Goldwyn and Beau Bridges as doctor brothers, with the former pulling a prank on the latter that may have ruined his career. Now Bridges seemingly gets his revenge when he proves his hypothesis – using Goldwyn’s body – that the brain stays alive after death for longer than we think. Fun episode that thankfully is not as racist as I expected regarding Haitian resurrection tropes.
What did we listen to?
Load, Metallica
A much greater variety of styles and tones than the band has ever done before – it wasn’t quite a Beatles-like moving through genre, but the riffs were more complicated and strange. I had a good time with this; I even threw a few songs into my Liked playlist.
Can’t seem to stopping listening to NBA podcasts long enough to catch up on Blank Check, but I started the one on Fearless and it just went off the rails so fast. I wonder if after a decade of listening to the show, the shagginess of it just doesn’t do it for me if I am not invested in the guest and the movie.
Meanwhile Keith Phipps and Mike Ryan have launched Ford Focus, a series about Harrison Ford’s movies. They are starting with The Fugitive and it’s only 45 minutes. Phills is still very low key, but I am thinking that 45 minutes of low key might beat 3 hours of high energy.
1001 Albums, etc.
The Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good: I think I only knew a couple of Sugarcubes songs (Birthday from this album, Hit from a later one), I enjoyed them a lot at album length and found this debut record to fall pretty squarely under the “what if there was an Icelandic B52s?” umbrella. Not complaining! Even though I’m fully aware of Bjork’s vocal powers from later work, it really stands out as exceptional here.
Dwight Yoakam – Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room: perfectly adequate country music. Not an album that made any real impression on me, positive or negative. Unclear whether the Lonely Room is a reference to his future work in Panic Room (2002).
Jane’s Addiction – Nothing’s Shocking: not sure I’d ever knowingly heard anything by these aside from “Been Caught Stealing”, which is not on this album. I like that song, I also liked quite a few of these songs. But I found this album notable for the songs I didn’t like being completely offputting to me. For the most part I enjoyed the lighter songs and hated the more “rock” ones, partly for leaning into songwriting tropes I don’t enjoy and partly for the production, which is just horrible on those heavy guitars in particular.
Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back: looking forward at the list, I’m excited for a bunch of the big breakthrough hip-hop albums that are mostly a blindspot for me (I’ve heard a fair bit of Wu Tang Clan and some De La Soul but there are some big names coming up I haven’t dug into at all). It’ll be tough for anything to top this one though to be honest, such killer energy and textured production.
Faith No More – The Real Thing: another band where I know a couple of big songs but nothing else. “Epic” probably the only one I really recognised here. Like Jane’s Addiction, there is some stuff here that foreshadows some of my least favourite music of all time (nu-metal in this case) but there’s a playfulness to the songwriting here, the songs are full of hooks and it’s a pretty crisp, inviting sound that does a lot better with the chunky guitars, so I had a pretty consistently good time.
Lenny Kravitz – Let Love Rule: another really good sounding album, the mid-80s has really had some dodgy production but perhaps we’re coming out of that period now? Kravitz famously played nearly every instrument on this and he did a great job keeping a “full band” feel despite the multitracking – I also love how his voice sounds when he double-tracks the vocals. What lets things down is the songwriting, which is a bit generic with some clunky lyrics and influences worn very obviously on its sleeve. But the general vibe was enjoyable despite those limitations.
John Lee Hooker – The Healer: I’d rather be listening to a proper Blues Guy than one of the (white) guitar-hero types who use the genre as an excuse to shred over basic chord sequences. BUT I still find the genre extremely uninteresting and this did very little for me.
New Order – Technique: oddly despite spending a LOT of time with earlier New Order, I don’t think I’d ever heard this. It’s great! Not a complete reinvention of their sound but definitely an evolution, will be playing this one a lot more I think.
Madonna – Like a Prayer: don’t think I’d heard this start-to-finish before although much of it was familiar. The highlights are some of the best pop music ever made, the lowlights are… still pretty good. The Prince collaboration is a little underwhelming though, it seems like those two working together should be more explosive.
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Blank Check, Finding Nemo – not particularly fussed about Andrew Stanton but they make a good case for this miniseries being perfect for the show in terms of the success / clear / bounce arc, and I enjoy Griffin nerding out about animation and theme park rides, plus I have seen most of the films so I think it’ll be a fun listen. Struggling to keep up with podcasting though, I need to take up a new boring hobby or something and generate some more downtime.
We Hate Movies’ Battleship episode is very funny and benefits from a good guest as well as a running gag about Peyton Manning. Stavvy’s World had Johnny Pemberton – AKA Beau on Superstore – on and one truly outrageous question (in essence: “I’m bi and cheated on my boyfriend with a woman – is this REALLY cheating?”) Blank Check’s John Carter was good as expected though I like the movie a bit more than they do.
Music: Ragtime is an example of a truly liberal musical I actually like, unlike Hamilton, in part because the history isn’t as incompatible with the emotional and political aims here. Helps to have some gorgeous and impactful songs, especially “Your Father’s Son” and “What A Game” – the latter may be the Sondheim-ish in the ambivalence towards class and culture; the Father is kind of a jerk yet sympathetic in how he recognizes that his more sophisticated, privileged way of thinking is disappearing as the 20th century moves forward. Should try the novel out sometime.
Year of the Month update!
This July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
TBD: James Williams: Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Jul. 10th: Gillian Nelson: Unidentified Flying Oddball
Jul. 17th: Gillian Nelson: Understanding Alcohol Use and Abuse
Jul. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Guards! Guards!
Jul. 21st: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 24th: Gillian Nelson: Don Bluth
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
Jul. 31st: Gillian Nelson: Big Thunder Mountain
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Ocean’s Eleven
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures