Sunburned Hand Of The Man – Pick A Day To Die

Three Lobed

Leaping off Headless’s comfy sofa, those Sunburned peeps are more frazzled and distinctively vocal with this year’s follow up release Pick A Day To Die on Three Lobed Records.

The sleek-lined kiss of the previous LP seems to be left to unravel more, to tail-spin adventurously as Jeremy Pisani’s flinting frets carve its introverted entry point, while a Basho barbecue of crystal chord called “Dropped A Rock”is vagabonded in weird washes of whale-like electronica in a really delicately observed piece.

Its subtlety is kicked around by the hollow echo of the guitar’s body, the layered overspill of which dribbles subliminally into the title track “Pick A Day To Die” with a warm if slightly predictable motorik verve that’s saved by the tilting guitar that knits in there, backdropping that familiar Sunburned vocal drool we’ve come to love from these free-folk veterans. There’s an associative smearing for the ears in “chicken dinners, Baltic salt therapy and Bllllaackkkkk leather diapers” as double-edged accents bloom from the harmonic layering, throw detail through those drone bones to neon the narrative in groove-ability.

Always loved the off-kilterness they bring to their wares and “Flex” injects a bit more wonky funk into the equation, a sonically slippery beast tripping this disco glaze and curling guitar sustain, but it’s “Black Lights” that nails it more directly, loosens things right up, in a classic wigged-out Hand Of The Man lesion of recoiling doubles and bassline bite, weaselling the harmonious noir like a prowling eel.

That drooling huffing-rag vocal returns on “Solved” to a little country / Hawaiian-tinged jigger, cloister-fed to a chorusing back draft, the melody happily skipping the traffic cones as that coruscating guitar cements the monologue so succinctly and an influx of elevated tones rush to inform the whole, elusively piranha(ed) by electronics. A ripe rhapsody that “Initials” liquefies into a nine-minute odyssey that sounds like three tracks running  simultaneously in a blunt bayou of fiddle scrapes and elasticised lumber that jigsaws with good judgement.

It’s a travelogue of salacious shimmer that invites effect-foddered vocals to poetically pigeon, burrow your head in scampering malfunction, leaving the last track “Prix Fixe” to bludgeon you in screamadelic luminosity and a muscular psychosis of brightness melting into this Pink Floyd-like oasis, a Gilmore twilight surfing a sulphurous prog-like snake of a glow that sorbets a solid smile. Without a doubt, Pick A Day To Die is another lug-icious jewel in Sunburned Hand Of The Man’s vast discography.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-