Sonny & the Sunsets (Photo: Alice Shaw)
It’s time for our roundup of all those highlights from the last few weeks that we weren’t able to feature on their own – here’s the best of the rest, as determined by The Bay Bridged editors.
Longtime local favs Sonny & the Sunsets announced a new album Talent Night at the Ashram, out February 17 on Polyvinyl. The album was originally a film project about society’s fringe characters – several short films that formed a feature-length movie when viewed sequentially. While writing the scripts and even hiring actors and shooting clips, frontman Sonny Smith found that the individual scripts were looking more and more like songs, and the project eventually morphed into this new release. Watch the video for album cut “Cheap Extensions,” a grimy animated short, below.
It’s always good to hear that Ben Chasny is at it again. Two years since the last release from his main project Six Organs of Admittance, he is back with a new album under that moniker. Hexadic is due February 17 on Chicago’s Drag City. First single “Wax Chance” is a five-and-a-half minute mind-bending eruption of guitars and disaffected vocals that finds Chasny firmly in the land of some of Nirvana’s deepest, distortion-ridden jams, adding a decidedly welcome spacey element to the mix – listen below.
“Recollection” is a new track off the forthcoming Foreign Pedestrians collaborative LP from Los Angeles producer Monster Rally and Oakland MC Jay Stone, and features Rally’s irresistibly grooving, jazz-influenced beat enveloping Stone’s hard hitting rhymes. Foreign Pedestrians is out January 27 on Gold Robot Records.
Sunmonks is a duo based in the Sierra foothills outside of Auburn, and they bring a refreshing mixture of R&B, soul, and ’70s pop on their debut EP In a Desert of Plenty, released October 28 on Crossbill Records. The band is readying their first full-length for 2015, but just released the video for the title track on that new EP, which finds songwriters Alexandra Steele and Geoffrey CK in the gorgeous California desert.
