Sunwatchers: Sun Worship (Picture Disc; Self-Released)

Record Grouch Exclusive:

Performed with casual mania in broad summer daylight on the beer-dappled sands of Virginia Beach amid the 2016 Logstradamus Surf Contest, this is a raging curveball set from Sunwatchers. Featuring no six-string guitar, eight string bass, synthesizer or set-list to speak of, here we find the Sunboys sans their atom-smashing stage-gear, plugged directly as one into a tottering sandblown PA system, and allowing their Ur-impetus of enmeshed Electric Phin & Alto Saxophone to forge a minimal, improvisatory swagger in key with the sunbaked surroundings. Aiding their core muses of drone, phase and free-jazz is native VA Beach surfer and PC Worship honcho Justin Frye on electronics, homemade third-bridge strings, and Lux-like vox. The group glides between material from their debut s/t LP for which they were touring and off-the-cuff stuff evincing their love of Link Wray, The Cramps, Booker T and The MGs and other sounds considered fundamentally “southern” and “surf-rock” alike.

Sun Worship was originally self-released in 2017 as a CDR featuring discreet 3D artwork by cartoonist Preston Spurlock; fervent fan interest in the out-of-print disc on an EU tour compelled the band to produce, as Sunwatcher Records 003, a picture-disc incorporating Spurlock’s original art and a snapshot of the band “onstage” right before the set. Recorded in the most econo way possible: on a field-recorder stashed inside a van used alternately, in true pier-punk fashion, as gear/booze transport and as a smoke-zone on the sand. So casually tweaked were the proceedings that two baked dudes crawl inside for a toke and unknowingly make perfect the alb’s final song with their lugubrious screwed-up commentary on the crowd, the surfing, the weather, and, of course “these ripping jams by The Sun Catchers(sic), who maybe have been playing a little too long.”  Think VU’s “Live At Max’s” —but this ain’t Jim Carroll, nor is it Pernod being passed; this jarring “home invasion” aspect of Side B offers one of the most deeply psychedelic sonic experiences in the band’s ever-growing catalogue.