The Right Track: Sun Araw’s “Hustle and Bustle”

Check out the cover to Sun Araw’s new record Heavy Deeds while listening to one of its tracks, “Hustle and Bustle.” As you listen to the crusty wah wah guitar glide through a heavy wash of feedback drones and keyboards played through overdriven amps, you’ll see a picture of a young Stevie Wonder superimposed over a photo of a crowded football stadium, the title of the record written in the same font you’d find on the poster of a 1970s buddy comedy or Russ Meyer sexploitation romp. While clearly the cover is meant to be somewhat self-consciously cheesy, it also points to a strong sense of what I referred to in my Wavves review as warped nostalgia.

When I listen to groups like Sun Araw and Emeralds and Infinity Window, I hear the sound of musicians digging through a couple decades worth of a musical and cultural trash, pulling out lame gas station giveaway promotional posters and broken Sounds of the Forest relaxation tapes. Unlike other bands fascinated with the past, these artists aren’t trying to execute a perfect homage–they’re giving us the sound of once vital genres, whether psychedelic rock or futuristic synth soundtrack music, ravaged by time. And along with the music we get images like the cover above and the cover to Sun Araw’s Beachhead record, a cheesy looking collage that mixes the look of a travel agency poster with lazer light show triangles and a picture of two travelers on donkeys cut out of a magazine. Combining the pathetic sales pitch of a tropical vacation, the wide-eyed neon futurism of the 80s, and the Herzogian strangeness of two travelers on donkeys walking across the ocean, the cover conveys almost every aspect of Sun Araw’s sensibility, including an interest in New Age mysticism that’s only half-joking.

Another name you could give for this kind of warped nostalgia is “hauntology,” the genre term coined by Simon Reynolds to describe the sound of England’s Ghost Box label, whose music is obsessed with the soundtracks to 60s and 70s UK public education films and television shows. Reynolds borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who used it to describe a present cultural and historical state forever haunted by both the broken ideas of the past and its inability to completely abandon the spirit of those same ideas. For groups like Sun Araw, it’s impossible to completely abandon the excitement that was contained in the psychedelic rock of the 60s and 70s or in the the futuristic, robots-will-do-everything-for-us sounds of 70s and 8os electronic music, but it’s equally impossible to believe those sounds will ever sound as fresh and as full of promise as they once did. To sound like what they’ve truly become, they need some grime and rust on them, some decay. 

Sun Araw – Hustle and Bustle

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