by Oliver on August 24, 2023 in Album
Eight years after debut Where Were You When The Stars Went Out? have Sun Vow (partially) regrouped to deal with You Have Your Whole Life Behind You Now losing in the midfield of competent shoegaze.
Jeremie White has been the only constant in the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based band with Jessica and Ricardo Sanchez (of Junfalls as well as Imgonnadie) for the vocals and drums, Ex-Holy Void-Drummer Patrick Caldwell on guitar and Charles Hesting (ex-Disparity Gospel) as a bassist put together a little Who’s Who of the local scene to share with Sun Vow to continue after a long break.
Unfortunately, however, only in an aesthetic and not necessarily qualitative respect, where the fine predecessor, already dark and secretly heavy, unfolded its washed-out booming dreams of melancholic depression severity and bitter-sweet nostalgia with more conciseness and generally more pointedly accentuated. Tips like the title song at that time or Feral/Astral In any case, the band does not reach this time.
While there is also up You Have Your Whole Life Behind You Now really successful scenes – especially when the dynamics after the good opener Valentine through some impulses like having vague surfing inklings in Operator or jangly indie rock concretizations in Barren Eyes stand out, the guitars exceptionally memorable moments in Monochromatic Maze emphasize and the flow of the record, especially in the middle part, picks it up.
But these moments on the second full-length player can hardly be differentiated from the mass in the little hanging uniformity (brand: nice forest – but we are the individual trees?). Often sound Sun Vow in this respect now often like climaxless ones (or: the sound has equalized the contours of the songwriting) The manewho got lost in a generic atmosphere.
Elementary for this effect is the vocals of Jessica Sanchez, transcending in the ethereal reverberation, which sometimes starts to have an eerily light bubblegum twang, but proves to be the final Achilles heel of the record all around, because the rest of the structure, which already tends to be colorless, gets through fade it out even more.
The latent gothic flair of the voice certainly fits the basic aesthetics, also works like an instrumental element, but the whispering melody lines are mostly just a random, uninspired meandering that starts to get on the edge of one-dimensionality.
This constellation turns what is actually a solid album into an okay standard that lets you switch to power, which seems almost too indifferent to generate positive or negative amplitudes away from the quickly forgotten average.
You have your whole life behind you now by Sun Vow
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