Bad Dream Jaguar

Sun June

Released on 20/10/2023 by Run For Cover Records
Main artists: Sun June
Genre: Alternative & Indie

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Despite the band's name, the third album from Austin, Texas, indie popsters Sun June is an ideal way to ease into autumn, the season that's all tangled up in fresh starts and nostalgia. The band constructs a noir bridge on "Eager," singer Laura Colwell sounding dreamy as the music builds ever so slowly behind her—manic ticking like a glitched-out clock, moody synth, spaced-out rhythm that sounds like footsteps in an empty building. "You have my mother's eyes/ They remind me how she sang along/ To late-era Neil Young/ In a company car back to Chicago," she sings, breathing storyteller life into the scene. Gently jangling "Mixed Bag" is sleepy-eyed in the manner of a late-sunrise morning, while "Ambitions" is as hushed and sweet as a prayer, Colwell channeling a blurred-lens Rickie Lee Jones as she reveals her goal: "I want to make you nervous." "Easy Violence," meanwhile, intrigues to a slow, steady, stalking beat. "Lightning" and "16 Riders" feel more earthbound in the vein of Cowboy Junkies as Colwell takes the lyric "It ain't nothing/ But I wish it was" and repeats it until the words go from wistful to imploring. The band tries out Regina Spektor whimsy for "Washington Square" and prom majesty on "Sage." And it's interesting when Colwell digs deeper, lower in her intonation on "Moon Ahead," its foggy horns and shakers fading in and out like twinkling starlight. Lovely piano ballad "John Prine" employs the late legend as a memory marker ("I'm not messed up/ I'm just falling asleep singing John Prine in the car"), and "Get Enough" finds Colwell "wish[ing] the Beatles would get back together." That song is practically hyper for the band, who have described it as "spring-time mania," the music pleasantly bobbing and spry even as Colwell sings of knowing good seasons never last: "When it all comes down to an ending/ I can feel it, I can almost save it." "Texas" also explores the conflict of letting go of comfortable memories to embrace a new but unknown beginning. "How am I supposed to give you up now? Keep breaking my heart, Texas," Colwell, who grew up in what she has described as the "cold, wet Northeast" (New York's Hudson Valley followed by college in Boston), sings of her adopted home and all that it symbolizes. "I'm a demon/ I'm a hell fire"—and slow burns still scar. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

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Bad Dream Jaguar

Sun June

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Eager