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Sungod's "Sungod"

In my first batch of three album reviews, I left the album by Sungod ("Wave Refraction") until the end because I was "saving the best till last". This time I've done it just to maximise the time between consecutive Sungod reviews to avoid people getting bored. That's not to say there's another album in this month's batch that I clearly enjoy more than this Sungod album. I don't think I have a clear standout favourite this month.

This review is of:

Sungod's self-titled album "Sungod".

For whatever reason I tend to think of self-titled albums as being debut albums, but that's not the case here. Sungod have released albums both before and after this one, so I'm not sure why they named this one after themselves.

This album is, on the whole, a little more mellow than Wave Refraction (WR). There's nothing that gets quite as energetic and in your face as that album's opening track "Little Gold Mouth". There's a lot more acoustic content here: more of the flute playing that I enjoyed on WR, but also a lot more acoustic guitar work, which - to describe it very vaguely because I don't know how to do any better - sounds "bluesy" to me. One Bandcamp review described the album as "Krautrock for cowboys". I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I see where their coming from. Just because this album is more mellow, doesn't mean it's boring background music. One of my favourite tracks, "Heavy Water" slowly builds up to a really powerful and slightly ominous throbbing bass drum beat and it's *anything* but boring.

Sungod also features more singing than WR did, which is to say: any at all. Nowadays I seem to have a fairly strong preference for instrumental music, and nothing I've reviewed on this gemlog so far has had any singing in it. Sungod is far from full of it, but one track, "Shiftless en Nkawnkaw", features singing. Once again, I have to resort to a very vague description for lack of enough understanding to do otherwise: the style of singing is somewhere in the region of...gospel? Soul? Something like that? Perhaps a fairly surprising choice for this style of music, but as I've mentioned previously, Sungod (the band) certainly aren't one trick ponies and they can make it work.

Probably my single favourite track on this album is the last one, "L'ame de Toute Etoile" (I don't speak French and have only just now translated this online, supposedly it's "The Soul of Any Star", please correct me if not). At twelve and a half minutes it's one of this album's two long tracks (my other favourite Heavy Water is just over thirteen minutes!). It's the most synth-heavy track on the album, the accompanying instruments are operating in rock mode rather than blues mode, and I think it's the track here that best exemplifies what I've come to think of as the quintessential "Sungod sound", the thing that I really loved discovering on WR. My more recent explorations into drone and psych music have in some sense steered me away from this kind of sound. I've found stuff there I enjoy, but not in the same way as this, and perhaps not to the same degree. I really need to start finding more artists who are closer in sound to stuff like Little Gold Mouth and L'ame de Toute Etoile.

I remain a huge Sungod fan. Like I said I would, on the day that Bandcamp donated all their profits to the NAACP's legal defence fund, I bought two other Sungod albums, so I have four now. I've dubbed them all, in order of release, onto a dedicated Minidisc. I love three of 'em and just quite like the fourth. I'm sure I'll pick up the rest at some stage, but I don't think I'll bother reviewing any more for this gemlog.