Written by: Dave Cantrell
After an uncharacteristically quiet 2014, the hardest working man in indie business after Robert Pollard – see our June 2013 review for all the breathless details – 100 Records man Sonny Smith is back with another winning slab of kaleidoscopic pop goodness that as usual rivals any other polyglot songwriter at work today and compares with favorable ease to those that have come before, be they named Rundgren, Partridge, or Wilson. Like Field Music with a West Coast sense of situation comedy humor – the group, not to forget, originate from Ocean Beach and now make their home in San Francisco – Sonny and his band of Sunsets (a revolving cast that has, in the past, included Shayde Sartin, Ryan Browne, Kelley Stoltz and Tahlia Harbour and here consists of Sartin and Ian McBrayer) return with a record the arc of which was originally intended as a film project. As a result, and rather deliciously, Talent Night at the Ashram tracks with a somewhat storyboarded logic, not unlike, yet not quite like, a concept album. It might better serve to think of it as a loosely-linked audio short story collection, the thematic précis of which is the whimsically disturbed, with a touch of alien hippiedom irresistibly thrown in for good measure. Whatever the case, it’s wicked fine pop that stints neither on sly intelligence nor the emotional heft that is at the genetic core of a certain sort of classic songwritiing – think Brill Building, think Tin Pan, think Goffin & King – and that’s far too thin on the ground these days. I mean, let’s just take a look at where we start.
“The Application” is the story of a…something – one assumes extra-terrestrial – that’s just applied for human being status, nervous and anxious and all backwards pending approval (“lighted my telephone and answered my cigarette, and started to weep because I heard a joke“), the whole thing all dressed up in a, umm, sunny popsike yearning that both underscores and mitigates its fairly undisguised commentary of the immigration debate. Cunningly wry and heartfelt, it’s Sonny & the Sunsets at their most quintessential, which is a bit silly to say, perhaps, as this band has a preternatural knack for hitting their targets obliquely square on.
“Cheap Extension”‘s opening, violin-haunted dance hall vibe gets pierced through by a pulsing bass beat to beat the band that quickly turns it into a disco-psych mini-extravaganza and how’s that for nailing the oblique square on? Not enough? OK, then, layer on purposely hammy synth-sounding keys to bring the 70’s upholstered basement bona fides into focus, wrap it all up in some ensemble playing that’s as tight as a lost Kool & the Gang cut and you’ve got one ace track. “Icelene’s Loss,” meanwhile, with its heartbroken-but-hopeful melody, covers the common pop trope of high-stakes bowling and the effects of that pressure on a simple girl from a strange family. Poignant without falling prey to the maudlin, it’s also the song Wayne Coyne wishes he’d written, let alone even thought of. Top kudos, though, should go to the seven-plus minute “Happy Carrot Health Food Store.”
The short-storyest, most unabashedly filmic track – and unsurprisingly the longest – “HCHFS” unpacks the employee dynamic of said establishment accurately enough to bring a broad grin of recognition to anyone that’s had even the least bit of intimate experience with such a place. As it also happens to traffic in an extended bout of tripped-out wigginess that’s understated in its own trancey kind of way that in turn prepares us not at all for the narrated coda that’s both plainspoken and just plain bizarre, involving a dog emoting in place of a lost lover and – oh hell, you’ll really just have to hear it.
In the end not quite the triumph of solid collagism that previous outing Antenna to the Afterworld was – a small handful of tracks here (“Alice Leaves For the Mountains,” “Blot Out the Sun”) feel a wee bit under-baked – we’re nonetheless blessed to be living in a world that includes the multitudes of a skewed outré-pop universe of which Sonny & the Sunsets are among the finest exemplars. Kudos to Polyvinyl and a small number of other labels – Happy Happy Birthday To Me, for instance – that not only don’t shy away from such wondrous hijinks but actually embrace them and give them a warm and supportive home. They, and the bands they nurture, deserve our support.
[buy Talent Night at the Ashram here]