Black Sunday –
Can’t Keep My Hands Off You b/w Lights
(Red Lounge/Disordered)

Y’know who are a really under-rated band from the past decade or so? Black Sunday, a Memphis band led by singer/synth player Alicja Trout. Admittedly, their 2005 magnum opus “Tronic Blanc” has a few things going against it: drab cover art that makes it look like some out-dated post-hardcore/emo effort, a slightly testing 45 minute run time and an opening cut of bilious shoegaze fartery. But stick with it and one of the more varied, atmospheric and inventive artefacts to have crawled from the indie/punk-ish undergrowth in recent years will surely be revealed.

Alicja was in Lost Sounds with Jay Reatard back in the day, a circumstance which seems to have gained her a foothold in the garage-punk milieu, despite Black Sunday working from a different blueprint entirely (although the continuity with Lost Sounds’ violent synth-rock/garage-trash crossover thing is certainly maintained). Let’s see now… we’re looking at something like cold wave/minimal synth kinda stuff, stripped of the accompanying aesthetic attitude and mixed up in variable quantities with bits of basement scuzz excavation and ol’ fashioned, upbeat KRS/K indie, perhaps..? I dunno. Her/their sound hits a lot of bases, but there’s little that ends up in quite the same place.

I don’t know what Black Sunday’s set-up is/was, or indeed whether this is really a Black Sunday single or an Alicja Trout solo joint, or quite what the difference between the two propositions might be, but I can at least assert that both sides here find her/them in good spirits, stretching the 3/4 minuters that comprised “Tronic Blanc” out a bit, letting each song luxuriate across a whole seven inches of of 33 playing vinyl. This single also cleans up the album’s grue to a significant extent, pushing guitars and distortion into strictly cameo roles, instead favouring cleaner, more repetitive synth-lines and simple drum loops, shifting toward a recognisable electro-pop kinda sound.

B side “Lights” would have been a real stand-out on the album, a convincingly catchy wavo power-pop number enlivened by some unexpectedly great lead guitar playing, but “I Can’t Keep My Hands off You” is longer, sweeter and even better; ascending synth patterns and a lovely melody over propulsive drum machine… I could almost imagine the twee-pop mob going for this, although the six note chorus refrain has a gloriously sinister edge to it, repeating through a lengthy closing segment that almost veers into Broadcast/United States of America territory. Quite a long track, as mentioned, but really, it could have been three times as long and still not lost my interest for a second. A real keeper.

I like the earlier/scrappier stuff fine, but I like this better. Listening to this single sorta makes it feel like the album, interesting/enjoyable though it is, was merely the middle ground between the bombastic sturm-und-drang of Lost Sounds and the more refined, more fully realised sound that’s finally making it’s way into the light here. To hear a full LP of this would be a fine thing indeed.

http://www.myspace.com/blacksundaymemphis
http://redloungerecords.com/

Labels: Black Sunday, singles reviews