With a joyous new album, the New York jazz-punk quartet responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Its follow-up EP lets their true feelings show.
Like a squad of beaming cheerleaders, New York quartet Sunwatchers spend much of their working lives cultivating pure joy. Especially on their fourth album, the devoutly playful Oh Yeah?, they deal in sax-and-guitar melodies so bright and rhythms so relentless they feel eternal. They pirouette through opener “Sunwatchers vs. Tooth Decay” with the gusto and precision of a professionally choreographed laser-light spectacle. Halfway through “Love Paste,” which lifts from a gleeful klezmer dance into an instrumental hook so big it could have belonged to Yes circa 1972, they shout “Whoo!” in gleeful unison. Hearing this sort of unbridled, earnest enthusiasm just feels good.
However radiant, though, Sunwatchers have forever ferried political messages of resistance and persistence. “Sunwatchers stand in solidarity with the dispossessed, impoverished, and embattled people of the world,” they broadcast on the cover of their second album, a credo they’ve repeated with every subsequent release. Their mascot—the Kool-Aid Man, absurdly clad in Braveheart body paint—lorded over Uncle Sam’s mutilated corpse on 2019’s Illegal Moves. They fantasize in interviews about making the music that destroys capitalism and vow in liner notes to “forge an atmosphere of radical empathy and acceptance.”
Sunwatchers’ rippling music works, then, much like American gospel or hardcore: It fights the power by flexing solidarity and responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Oh Yeah? is vivid and boisterous. Burrowing between chiptune’s glee and doom metal’s glumness, “Thee Worm Store” conjures images of a video-game hero barely escaping the clutches of a particularly baleful boss. “Brown Ice” feels like the score for a movie montage where ardent young revolutionaries make their final preparations to overthrow the government, gathering supplies and scheming by lamplight.
They’ve never been better than on “The Earthsized Thumb,” an extended anthem for overcoming the seemingly insurmountable. For the first 13 minutes, Sunwatchers repeat and revolve around a single bracing theme, circling it like an obstacle they can’t overcome. But then alto saxophonist Jeff Tobias has had enough. He screams into his horn like Sunwatchers’ inspiration Albert Ayler, his tone providing the call to arms. The band springs into action for the odyssey’s final quarter, beating the theme into submission with a synchronized assault. It’s impossible not to feel emboldened by it.
On Brave Rats—a subsequent six-track EP, consisting of alternate versions and live renditions of old favorites, plus a few catalog obscurities—Sunwatchers relax their guard, or at least the need to sound so triumphant. Yes, they erupt into a jubilant clatter during “Everybody Play!” and dance through Sonny Sharrock’s “Blind Willie” with the élan of Akron/Family during those fleeting moments when they seemed like the country’s next great jam band. But mostly, they allow the anxiety and pessimism they typically funnel into rapturous hooks and ecstatic waves of improvisation to stand alone. It’s like watching a seasoned pop star dazzle a sold-out arena, then collapse backstage and confess how they really feel.
“Sazx,” a rhythm-less duet for Tobias’ yearning horn and Jim McHugh’s jarring guitar, suggests a nightmare driven by a waking loop of self-doubt so extreme it haunts you in your sleep, too. Closer “Pedal One,” a scrap from an old soundtrack, pulses like Steve Reich slowed by Dilaudid, drugging the urban busyness of his work until it scans as dread. Even the magnetic hook and road-trip esprit of “Brave Rats” can’t camouflage the despair in Tobias’ brittle saxophone tone or the menacing keyboard notes that line the track like rusty razor blades.
The first several times I heard Oh Yeah?, I pined for something like one of the bummers on Brave Rats, a song that made clear the complex emotions and revolutionary urges at play. Sunwatchers have touched on that feeling in the past, particularly with Illegal Moves. But as the weeks passed and the world changed, the album’s sense of unfettered joy—of shouting down misery simply by playing together—became reassuring to revisit, a reminder of the energy a band and audience can share in a crowded concert hall. A studio album that moves with the delight of a live explosion, Oh Yeah? is even more welcome at a time when that kind of catharsis is temporarily out of stock.
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