There is no doubt that this 2023 has started in an excellent way for American roots music made by women. And it is that to the excellent discs of Margo Price and HC McEntire we can now add this “Anarchist Gospel” of Sunny War and we will have a splendid triad that will delight any fan. Three great works that we could place under the enormous umbrella of the Americana, but with very different views from each other. Margo’s outlaw-country and southern gaze, HC McEntire’s queer gaze projected from a corner of Appalachia, and the hard Nina Simone gaze of this petite yet intense girl who hides under the alias of Sunny War and who is actually called Sydney Lyndella Ward. And if I have to choose one of the three, I prefer the latter for different reasons.
It is not the first time that I speak of Sunny War in Sound World. I already did it on the occasion of the edition of his previous work, also splendid “Simple Syrup” (21), where she took the opportunity to explain the story of our protagonist, who is largely responsible for the strange personality of her music. A vital journey that led her to escape from her home at a very young age to wander around playing in the street and flirt dangerously with drugs and alcohol until she ended up in prison at the age of 19 with a one-year sentence. Finally settled in Venice Beach (Los Angeles), she begins to dazzle everyone who listens to her with the way she touches the nylon strings of her guitar, in which she combines the touch of Delta blues with the country music of her native Nashville. . It is then that she realizes the need to compose her own songs in which she pours all those experiences accumulated throughout her 32 years of age. And so we come to this sixth studio work titled, with all the intentions in the world, “Anarchist Gospel”.
It should be said from the outset that the new work of Sunny War presents some news. Perhaps the most important for his career is the signing by New West, which could provide him with greater exposure than he has had to date. And it was only a matter of time before the personal owner of Sunny War began to attract the attention of the industry in her country. In fact, J. Micah Nelson (Particle Kid), son of Willie Nelson, already participated in the previous album and in this “Anarchist Gospel” the palette of collaborations is expanded with names as illustrious as those of the Canadian activist and singer Allison Russell, Californian Chris Pierce, Jim James of My Morning Jacket and country-folk royalty like David Rawlings. Almost nothing. All this already shows to a great extent that we are dealing with a very special artist capable of weaving complicities that reinforce her sound. And that is another of the highlights of this album. The production, unlike his previous works, is much more robust and full of details, embellishing his songs with a greater number of arrangements that wrap his tunes with the guitar and that robust voice that is one of his most identifying hallmarks.
And above all this are, of course, the songs. Fourteen jewels that surround and move you with the wisdom of an old soul trapped in a thirty-two-year-old body. Stories that exude that spirituality that we already find in the title of the album, but detaching it from any type of religiosity. Hence the anarchist nature of his proposal. Stories of heartbreak and breakup, of addiction without a trace of guilt, but also of despair and fury. Redemption stories without the need for divine intervention, only human. A way of writing that Sunny War itself acknowledges having learned from artists such as Elliott Smith, Meshell Ndegeocello, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley or Gillian Welch. A list as eclectic as the feel of her music. That’s why the album can go from the dramatic folk-rock of “Shelter And Storm” to the vaporous blues ofe “Love’s Death Bed”, the most trotting country-western of “No Reason”, the bluesgrass touch of “Test Dummy”, the saddest ballad in “Sweet Nothing” or two versions as different from each other as Dionne Farris’s “Hopeless” or a magnificent “Baby Bitch” by the seminal Ween. Fourteen jewels that will touch you in the depths of your most prosaic soul.