Blood Of The Sunworm

Blood of the Sunworm - Giant Skyflower Band (2007, Soft Abuse)

KJ_
8.8/10
Trippppy.

H_
7.4/10: a little too amorphous for me, but it's all about feeling

I can’t claim to have even seen the words Giant-Skyflower-Band in concurrence before Tony brought up this psychedelic progressive pop band. After a cursory inspection of merely the album art, one can tell that this album, Blood of the Sunworm, is the definition of low-publicity casual music. But, they say not to judge a book by its cover, and so should not the same be applicable to music?

After a few quick listens (the album doesn’t even break the half hour mark), Blood of the Sunworm feels like the set list that an American folk/pop band would play in an opium den in India. The general mood and primordial palpation of the closing instrumental track, “Meditations on Christ and the Magi,” is an excellent example. Listening to that track makes me feel like I’m lying down on a couch in someone’s obfuscated basement, while light sneaks through soupy windows and I pass a hookah around with people I don’t even know.

The rest of the album isn’t quite so specifically atmospheric, distinguished by an almost perpetual primitively played guitar and acid-afflicted drums. For me, the disc’s highlight is the brief instrumental “All of Us (You and Me)”. The undeniable inebriated vocals of Glenn Donaldson vacate the premises for a while, and the group sits down to compose, an aspect evidently exigent on the rest of the album. The result really is beautiful, ineffably so.

In summation, Blood of the Sunworm presents nothing more than an exceptionally trippy jam session from the brainchild of strange pop. It’s immediately intangible, but equally infectious at times; I think it will warrant a few summer listens. Don’t expect Pink Floyd just because I mentioned psychedelic and progressive in the opening paragraph; this one’s peregrine in every sense of the word.

_Schantz
6.7 / 10

It has all the right components: a laid back lo-fi sound, a vocalist with a really interesting voice, some acoustic guitars and drums with exotic instruments mixed in, and a name like “Giant Skyflower Band”. The opening track starts out very solid. Distant strumming slowly comes together into a twanging echoing sitar soaked backdrop to Glenn Donaldson’s lovable crooning. But then the next track comes on and it’s the same pieces used in the exact same way. And again. And again.

Sure there have been several great bands where every song sounded the exact same (Galaxie 500, the Strokes, Guitar Wolf), but this album just didn’t strike me that way. All of the songs drift along slowly propelled by some soft acoustic guitar and sitar strumming.

Don’t get me wrong, it has it’s moments of glory, and they’re pretty glorious. The opening track is a perfectly crafted piece of psych-folk-pop that sounds like Donovan just rolled out of bed. The closing track Meditations on Christ and the Magi drifts along for several minuets of lush sitar drone with just the right touch of ambient noise thrown in. Feast of Blood finally brings an organ into the mix and the result is that variety that is greatly needed and the chorus “don’t be afraid of the feast of blood” happily juxtaposed against a lazy sunshine brigade of music.

Blood of the Sunworm has a great vibe to it, but so many of the tracks sound recycled versions of one another. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by the great variety of the Elephant 6 bands in the same vein that used three times as many instruments, but I was really expecting more (think Olivia Tremor Control). The band was created when “ Donaldson quickly invited multi-instrumentalist Shayde Sartin to ‘smoke marijuana & make up strange pop songs,’ and thus the band was born.”, and it’s a bummer when that’s all the band sounds like. The album has its gems, but those nuggets of bliss are sewn together with sadly forgettable psych-pop songs that are one step away from being great.