Blonde Bill, y’all! Like the proverbial phoenix from the hash,
Sunset }}} rise from the mess that was the implosion of Austin’s Sound Team late last year. That band’s astoundingly screamin’ rise to the top culminated in both a gig in Central Park opening for Arcade Fire and David Bowie and a deal inked with Capitol, then proceeded to end quick as a rabbit when they were capital-D Dropped after the decidedly underwhelming {Movie Monster} in 2006. Many members of the Team jumped ship shortly thereafter, but the rest hobbled along for the better part of a year before finally deciding to end it with a final send-off at the Austin City Limits Festival in 2007.{{{ Sunset }}} is primarily the baby of main Sound Team songwriter/bassist and owner of the nation’s finest custom license plate (“YESSS”), Bill Baird. The band has existed in some form or another (bedroom folk, ramshackle country-rock, psychedelic Band send-up) for several years, but the cessation of Sound Team has allowed Baird to focus fully on {{{ Sunset }}}. Lately, the now-solidified lineup includes fellow former Teamster Sam Sanford along with a host of others (very occasionally climbing up to eight, 98% of whom play guitar). The usual string of cassettes and CD-Rs leads up to {Bright Blue Dream} being the band’s real debut to the public at large.Bill Baird likes to stretch out. Song structures on {Bright Blue Dream} start loose and move to nonexistent by the end. Recorded at Sound Team’s Big Orange studio (a play on The Band’s {Big Pink}), the production on the album is a major triumph, especially for something that was essentially self-produced. Lock-groove drumming dominates the album’s first clutch of songs, not flouting inventive rhythms or technical proficiency, but making a huge sound. Through the first three tracks, the instrumentation all comes from the same template: big drums, piano, and droning guitars. “Man’s Heart Complaint” is where {{{ Sunset }}} really start to impress. I’ll be shocked if anyone writes a song I like more this year. The album’s best groove, best chorus, and best melody put a big period on the end of {Bright Blue Dream}, Phase One.Things start disintegrating on “Gulf of Mexico,” a song you’d only know was about Texas’s Mustang Island town Port Aransas if you’d been there. Droning strings and horns open things up before Baird counts off the commencement of the song proper and evokes beach houses, ghost crabs, and fish on your placemat. The bizarre chorus of “{Did you know it’s the only free ferry left in the States?}” carries some serious weight amid the gauzy harmonica and dream-guitar. There’s a proper song somewhere inside the quarter-hour drone of the title track, but you can barely tell. Baird adds some extremely unexpected and extremely effective steel drums to the track, not exactly the instrument most readily associated with ambient ebb. That track bleeds into the instrumental thrum and drone of “Moebius,” which peaks with feedback guitar and cymbals and, in turn, rides out into the confusing, seven-second, cover-art-referencing “TV’s That Were His Eyes.” Things re-coalesce on the tom-thumping, humming psych-folk of “Old Sandy Bull Lee,” falling apart into the piano purr of “Golden Reverie.”{Bright Blue Dream}’s only fault is that however great the opening few tracks are, they get lost on repeat listens as anticipation builds for the streak that “Man’s Heart Complaint” initiates. The album is long and could use a trimming, but for an album’s most serious flaw to be that its first few great songs don’t quite stack up to its closing fantastic ones is hardly a flaw at all.{{{1. Dear Broken Friend2. Diamond Studded Caskets3. I Love My Job4. Man’s Heart Complaint5. Gulf of Mexico6. Bright Blue Dream7. Moebius8. TV’s That Were His Eyes9. Old Sandy Bull Lee10. Golden Reverie
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