Review & Video Premiere: Sun Blood Stories, Haunt Yourself
[Click play above to stream the premiere of Sun Blood Stories’ video for ‘See You on the Other Side.’ Haunt Yourself is out Sept. 20.]
The fourth full-length from Boise, Idaho’s Sun Blood Stories continues the forward progression of purpose and creative scope that has played out in their work over the last six years. It has not been that long since the trio unveiled their third LP, 2017’s It Runs Around the Room with Us (review here), and yet the 12-track/45-minute Haunt Yourself unveils a fluidity and a personality all its own, marked by a soul and emotionalism in the vocals of slide guitarist Amber Pollard and guitarist Ben Kirby (both also add bass synth to the recording) and a floating post-rock psychedelia that is admirably given shape through the drumming of Jon Fust (also keyboards). As has been their wont on past offerings, they find footing in an early hook — thinking of tracks like “The Great Destroyer” from the last record or “West the Sun” from 2015’s Twilight Midnight Morning (review here); their debut, The Electric Years, came out in 2013 and was more formative — this time moving from the swirling fog of “TIME” at the outset to the interwoven vocals and forward rhythm of “Up Comes the Tunnel” (video posted here), wherein their sound hits arguably the thickest point it will on the entirety of Haunt Yourself.
With this, they set up a broad and experimentalist range the richness of which is not to be understated, from the emotional crux of songs like “No One Can Hear You Dream,” with its repetition of “In the end we all will…” whether the answer is burn, die, and so on, or “All the Words in Meaning” (video posted here) just before it with its vocal lashing out or the earlier “Everybody Loves You,” on which the resounding feel is less comforting than the title, Pollard seeming to take on the role of that voice in your head that tells you how much better off everyone would be if you were gone. “Everybody loves you,” you see, “When you’re dead.” This is its own kind of aural brutality apart from any sonic impact Haunt Yourself may or may not make — and the bulk of the album is striking in its patience and gentle delivery — but if you ever needed a lesson in conjuring emotional weight, here it is.
That’s not necessarily new territory for Sun Blood Stories, but their progression has made them more pointed in their approach, such that pieces like the bluesy “At Once in All Directions” or even the ultra-fluid jam in the early cut “See You on the Other Side” that follows “Everybody Loves You” both serve an overarching intent that covers Haunt Yourself as a whole, and the album resulting is built from the conversation between the songs that comprise it. Something something whole, something something sum of parts, but if my assessment is trite, that doesn’t necessarily make it less true as regards the front-to-back listening experience. And make no mistake, front-to-back is how Haunt Yourself should be taken. Each track seems to have a singular purpose, but those never veer too far from the overarching goals of the record as to disconnect from it. Ever-conscious of flow, Sun Blood Stories make this even easier by dividing the tracklisting into three three-song sections, each beginning with its own interlude.
Those pieces, “TIME,” “LIKE” and “SMOKE,” never go much past two and a half minutes, but together work not only to provide an underlying theme to Haunt Yourself, but also to bring the album into context of their past, as Twilight Midnight Morning featured the cut “Time Like Smoke” as well. And whether it’s in “See You on the Other Side” or the penultimate “Approaching Shadow,” the sense of drift throughout Haunt Yourself is especially prevalent, but at no point do Sun Blood Stories let it go anymore than they choose to. That is to say, while even the cover art speaks to a notion of working against traditionalist structure — something time (like smoke) has proven the band to be quite adept at — they never lost sight of where they want the listener to be throughout the proceedings. Given the breadth of “All the Words in Meaning,” “No One Can Hear You Dream” and “At Once in All Directions” in the record’s middle third, that’s an accomplishment unto itself, but moments like Kirby coming forward in “At Once in All Directions” or Pollard doing the same with a somewhat buried highlight vocal performance on “7 Swords” do a lot to orient anyone who’d take on Haunt Yourself, and that proves to be another way in which the songs each enhance the listen of the album as an entire work.
Following the final interlude piece “SMOKE,” “7 Swords” leads the way into the Western airiness of “Approaching Shadow,” one of only two songs to top six minutes — the other is “No One Can Hear You Dream,” longer at 6:40 — and the 2:21 closer “Shimmer Distant,” a layered-vocal Pollard/Kirby duet that feels like an epilogue after the payoff of “Approaching Shadow” and ends with a final volume swell that cuts out to silence. It’s a fair enough and still somewhat unexpected ending for Haunt Yourself, giving the feeling of answering back the earlier explorations without discarding the psychedelic flavor thereof.
This is emblematic of a maturity in Sun Blood Stories‘ approach, which one would expect for a band on their fourth record, having solidified their lineup and seemingly figured out who they want to be as a group as much as any of us figure out who we want to be ever in any context at all — at least the direction they want to go, perhaps? One way or the other, the individualized progression they’ve undertaken suits them beautifully, and both in the chemistry of the performances between Kiby, Pollard and Fust and the atmosphere that comes across so thickly amid still-memorable songcraft, Haunt Yourself succeeds on every level of expression it engages, and as the fruit of the three-piece refining their processes as established across the work they’ve done since making their debut, it speaks to the root creativity so central in driving it. I won’t predict where they might go next time out, except to say forward along their own path, and all the better for that.
Sun Blood Stories, Haunt Yourself (2019)
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Tags: Boise, Haunt Yourself, Idaho, Sun Blood Stories, Sun Blood Stories Haunt Yourself, Unsigned bands
