The Sun Blindness Like Pearly Clouds by: Thomas Mendelovits Wed:08-Oct-08 Label: Sensory Projects Year: 2008 WB rating 70 out of 100

Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it isn’t. Whatever it is, it’s strange that two records from two bands from the same city, with one common player between them, are released in the same year, and both by the same label. Wait: in a city like Melbourne, that’s not so strange at all… What’s strange is that the bands in question – The Sun Blindness and the Sand Pebbles (with Tor Larsen playing guitars for both) – have both, ostensibly, proffered master classes on honest to goodness psychedelia. Of course, it probably is just a twist of fate that the Sand Pebbles’ third-record, Ceduna, and The Sun Blindness’ debut Like Pearly Clouds have happened to come out within a few months of each other. Perhaps, though, there is a deeper meaning. For, while the Pebbles prefer the tripped out expanses of full-band jams to the Blindness’ close-quarters harmonies, they do have one thing in common: sincerity. Where other bands revel in pastiche and retro-posturing, the Sun Blindness and the Sand Pebbles sound like the real deal, employing a modesty (this despite some po-faced backwards guitar) that rescues their music from simply being an awkwardly referential rehash.

At its best, Like Pearly Clouds succeeds somewhat in reconciling the two opposing paradigms of much genre music – that of the need for all-pervasive mood together with a yen for pop conciseness that makes such ambience more than mere sounds and thus, truly great. Much of Like Pearly Clouds concerns itself, albeit effectively, with the lulling effect of various layers of delayed guitar, shakers, tambourines, and buried yet intimate, vowel-enunciated, Simon and Garfunkel-via-the-West Coast vocals. A rare non-vocal example, opener ‘Our Glassy Selves’ is a relaxed four minutes that feels like it could be much longer, so languid and unconcerned with form is its progress. While, with their light and airy aesthetic (joyously high voices, clean guitars, hand percussion: see ‘Flash in the Cosmic Pan’) the Sun Blindness, formalistically at least, definitely live in a 60s groove, their brand of psych also leans heavily on 80s psych-drone. Like the smack-odes of Jesus and Mary Chain, Spiritualised and Spacemen 3 without the menace (or the smack), at times the Sun Blindness rely less on the blues and more on the transcendent potential of two-chord simplicity. Of many tracks using this, ‘It’s Only 3am’ works well in the simple, almost acoustic-shoegaze formula.   
    
Thus, where the record truly excels is in the teaming of a trippy aesthetic with more hook-based moments of pop clarity. While rushed in comparison to most of the record, the lyrical melody of ‘Sleep Inside’ is so pretty, and the competing guitar motifs so lovely, that even the listener most soporifically induced by Like Pearly Clouds would feign to be impressed. In another mode, the percussive interplay between ringing tambourine and choral shamanistic voices on ‘Everything is Imminent’ is deeply situated enough within a thoroughly indirect frame that when the voices move into sweet narrating melody, the Sun Blindness have successfully led the listener on a journey from open spaces to something more tangible. When present, this tangible quality makes moments of Like Pearly Clouds all the more memorable, for the simple fact that you are able to grasp them.

While it is truculent to critique an artist on something for which you have just praised them, the biggest problem with Like Pearly Clouds rests on this same reconciliation of pop smarts and vibey out-to-lunchisms. In offering light and shade, usually so relieving, the Sun Blindness approach a liminal zone, where both the songs proper and the more spacious moments struggle to find firm footing. ‘Flash in a Pan’ is most indicative of this trend, where a fairly standard acoustic based track gives way to a freeform freak-out; like a structural flipside to the preceding ‘Everything is Imminent’. More fatally, on ‘Everything Comes Right’, which at seven minutes is the record’s longest track, the snatches of vocals are so dispersed and so melodically dissimilar that it is even harder to keep up engagement. Perhaps for people totally willing to lose themselves in the sonic universe of the Sun Blindness, these unfocussed moments will reveal themselves rather as various departure points. Often, however, as charming as it is, Like Pearly Clouds seems slightly undecided on its tack.