Review: Sunshine

Sunshine
“Necromance”
(GSL)

This band had me from the first 20 seconds when they came in with this hip 80’s sounding keyboard being jacked into a speedy tempo and guitars dripping in echo.  It’s almost like this band is painting with a lot of 80’s colors, but not coming off anything like an 80’s band.  Nice trick.  Singer Kay has this snotty Billy Corrigan-esque thing going on that works well.  And keyboards!  Again, I get that 80’s kick off them, but then the music hits with the sticky, echoing guitar mentality making the whole thing come off like something you haven’t heard before, but constantly strain to find the (should be obvious but aren’t) lines back to their 80’s influences.

Sunshine can be moody and spaced out, or all jacked up and moving along on a drug-like urgency.  A few numbers even, dare I say, ‘rock’ underneath the layers of feedbacks and distortions (“Punk and Chic”).
Not afraid to layer some heavy effects in there, the band does well to not bury anything letting songs groove by on some serious heady flows.  This would make a good opener for Ikara Colt.  Not sure if it’s intentional, but this disk seems to start off with a rocking pop sensibility, but as songs progress,
Sunshine drift into more somber and experimental numbers.

The spiral downward is easily felt (except for the aforementioned spike of “Punk and Chic”), until it ends with four different versions of “Astral Love” (mostly techno jockey rehash masturbation and does nothing, if not dilute the impact of the disc).  But for the rest of this album, this is left of center, without completely leaving the road.

Recommended for something different, that reminds you of something not so different.