4 out of 5

Label: Trouble in Mind

Produced by: Sunwatchers

While free-form art rock – a blanket term I’ll use that encompasses any band who’s blending the rock n’ roll stew with genre X, Y or Z, in the spirit of stepping away from strict verse/chorus/verse convention – while this has never exactly gone away, ever since bubbling up in the 60s or 70s as a jazz offshoot, its had its ebbs and flows like any scene. And from my narrow, not-a-music-historian perspective, when King Gizzard did their five-albums-in-a-year move in 2017, I felt like I started seeing an uptick in psychedelic bands in that vein. Surely some (if not all…) of that was confirmation bias, but every week brought to my awareness some other band doing ten-minute songs that blended guitar skronk with trippiness and, like, jazz standards. It became harder to find the true diamonds in that crowd, even if / when reviews or peers were trying to guide me to such standouts.

None of this preamble matters in telling you that Sunwatchers 2023 release, Music is Victory Over Time, is awesome, but I suppose I wanted to pass it on because the band has not only rigorously stuck to their own thing as the scene has shifted and morphed around them, but is also – for me – one of the few acts that still excites when they drop a release, without any self-cajoling to include the disc in my playlist, or any kind of contextual explanation as to why such and such record sounds the way it does.

You can just hit play.

And hitting play on Victory gives us a seven song set that’s equally some of the hardest rocking and most melodic of Sunwatchers’ ouevre to date, with the only sticking point being the transition between those styles.

World People and Too Gary are both barrages of riffage, with the former having a fitting all-hands-on vibe that provides kitchen sink instrumentation, but in service of a followable musical thread through its ebb and flow. It is immediately rocking and chaotic, but also accessibly immersive. The latter leans more into a punk vibe, including a gloriously gang-shouted vocal at its climax. Both of these are buildups to the nigh-Luttenbacher blitz of T.A.S.C., which is also an appropriate mash-up of the noisy melody of the lead-ins.

On the back half, krautrock surging of Tumulus leads into the jazzy slink of There Goes ol’ Ooze, with closer Song for the Gone bringing a slow, sad and contemplative tone that functions as a great way to reflect on the journey. These songs that same miraculous combination of looseness and form, but twist expectations by showing how that can be achieved throughout a calmer seeming veneer; emotive peaks are reached through both approaches, and, as well as musical peaks – moments of intensity – which arguably are sharpened in the later tracks by paralleling with the all-out approach of the starting ones.

The sticking point is what happens in the middle: Foams. Foams harmless sounding title is also representative: it’s a longform jam, very feelgood, very lowkey. It’s wandering sense is more like a band like Gizzard – in their folkier moments – but it’s just not the right tonal middle for this album, especially at its length. I can see it as an intro (in an abbreviated form) or outro, but it’s such a jump from the rockers and so compararitively flat versus the jazzier tunes that, yes, it effectively splits the listen in two, but not in an ideal bridging fashion. It’s not unpleasant! Just out of place.

Tellingly, though, I don’t skip this track, and it doesn’t diminish my eagerness for more Sunwatchers, or to go back and listen to the rest of their catalogue. My faith is firm. Music is victory for the band, over time, of course, but also as soon as you hit play.