Sunburned Hand of the Man are a living monument to a different era of rock and roll. They emerged from the dense concrete forest of Boston in the late ’90s at the end of a period when heady rock and roll still had some purchase in the American music scene, passing through the sliver-sized aperture opened by the alternative rock boom. Their style of heavily abstracted, enigmatic folk and skull-tripping rock was likened to that of similarly spell-binding No-Neck Blues Band and labeled the free folk movement by Wire Magazine 2003, just as a pale, sharp-cheek boned coup of trifling hipsters were doing the dirty work of filing rock down to a rounded, vestigial ornament in the great cultural mecca of New York just to their north. Shifts in the earth beneath them were hardly a deterrent though. As the twin hydras of commercial appeal and rancorous natrionalism acted as leaden albatross around the necks of most musicians during the Bush years, Sunburned Hand of the Man released a bewildering number of ecstatically esoteric albums on various labels, from Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! to Eclipse Records, and many others.
Given the idiomatic nature of their first decade as a band, it would seem improbable that they would be dormant for any length of time, and the group’s most recent effort, Pick A Day To Die sees the band returning to the jive of their familiar, if decidedly non-euclidian, form. The album breaks an unnatural period of silence for the band, following their 2010 album A as their first proper LP in over a decade. The material here isn’t entirely new though, having been culled from previous recordings made between 2007 and 2017. As a sort of jumpstart to the second leg of their career though, it seems appropriate for the band to revisit their storied past while turning to face their future.
Pick A Day To Die unveils its self with the inviting opener “Dropped A Rock” which ripples and quivers like a bucket of water that a pebble has dropped into, wavelets of sound crossing each other in a delicate dance of warry but intimate affection, as if subtlely aware that they are being observed but unsure of how much mind to pay their minders. The following and title track “Pick A Day To Die” emerges as if from an entirely different plane of existence- a dusty, darkly poetic assemblage of howling electronics, motorik jetstreams, and psychic-pin cushion turns of phrase, asking you whether you want an eight-piece chicken dinner, before inviting you to unzip your mask and taste the campfire. The whole experience is like a backpacking trip with a zombie shaman, who appears to return to his former health and vigor at night in the pale light of a harvest moon. “Flex” is true to its name with an elastic bass chord that wraps around and elongates a jittery fry of prickly electronics and a scrub of clean sheered, orbital guitar cascades. “Black Lights” sounds like a Stooges penned theme to a spy thriller, a Detriot funk drag covering for a nasty drug habit. “Solved” picks up the saddle and spurs of the title track for a Beefheart-brained lope and trot, while “Initials” bubbles with Stereolab-esque test conditions of intrigue and paranoid jitters. This all leads to the final track, a third-act heel-turn and precipitous slide into Unsane-esque noisecore that recovers its sense just in time to transition into a desert blues-guided rare soul glide.
Sunburned Hand of the Man is the band you never knew you needed to hear, and Pick A Day To Die is as good a place any to enter the dense maze of their discography. You can stream the entirety of Pick A Day To Die below via Bandcamp:
Get a copy of Pick A Day To Die on vinyl from Three Lobed Recordings here.
