Apollo Sunshine - Apollo Sunshine
Author: Mikey I. McClelland
Release Date: September 13, 2005
Label: SpinART
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I took one major step towards living an adult life eleven months ago, when I hosted the family Thanksgiving dinner at my tiny Greenpoint apartment. Present at said dinner: my mother, my brother and my good friend Tess. We ordered sushi, a lot of it, and Tess brought over a bottle of sake. We feasted. We gave thanks--my mother, my brother and I for our makeshift family gathering, and Tess for the camaraderie and some damn fine sashimi.
Coming to New York for something unlike any Thanksgiving we'd had to date seemed reasonable. It had been a rough year for the fam, and we needed to do something new. That explains the sushi. It also it explains the night prior, my brother yet to arrive from Ohio, and my mother and I looking for something to do in the city. When I noticed an ad for Apollo Sunshine at Bowery Ballroom, I said to her, you would love these guys. So we bought tickets.
That night, Apollo Sunshine performed much material from its forthcoming The Other Side of the World EP and self-titled sophomore full-length. It was well received by a sizable Bowery crowd, my mother and I included, applauding with pint glasses in our hands and grins on our faces.
Since then, Apollo Sunshine has released a proper effort comprised of the materials perfected live over so many months. It's a wonderful mess of Americana and rockabilly, Southern strings of sound twisted around sweet pop music. All this, from Boston's new indie champions.
Apollo Sunshine opens with "Flip!", whose sweet, diving riffs descend from the same lineage as prior live staple and Katonah anchor "Fear Of Heights". Its melody builds for a moment, then is abruptly cut off by frontman Jesse Gallagher, screaming, "Flip!" Drums bottom out and Gallagher gently re-builds: "Now, I'm on the other side of the world." He means it as a grand metaphor, of course, and when the guitars come back to life everything is a kindler, gentler Apollo Sunshine.
This is, quite literally, the new Apollo Sunshine. Gone are the hooks and pop pretension. Here now is a thick Americana accent firmly nailed to stiff rockabilly roots. It no longer seems as though the boys Apollo are aiming to achieve something outside of themselves in sound; Apollo Sunshine finds the band decidedly comfortable in its own clothing.
"Ghost" follows in the lineup--performed live with ethereal bells--and cements the theory for this new evolution. Building from a whispered introduction, "Ghost" climaxes and falls back into its very first words: "When I feel the breeze through me/I don't know if I'm a ghost/So I try to sing something/Like I'm feeling in my bones." The track feels like a haunting, indeed one where your own suspicions of sympathetic uncertainty might be the most worrisome.
This matured introspection is a development of note on Apollo Sunshine. On the band's debut Katonah, songs felt like stories, each a foray into a pre-adolescent fantasy of innocence and wonder; before, each track seemed in awe of itself. Now, the band spends just as much time creating addictive instrumental solos, only these solos expound on the words rather than paint them a picture.
On "Phyliss," for example, the day-to-day reality of life as a pet rabbit, the mundane takes on grander meaning. Between plodding bass and Ghallager's detached recitation:
"I'm gonna drink a lot of water/Rinse a few things out/I'm gonna make a note to make a note/of what day it is/every day I'm up/You can say there's more to life than this/but there's always more to life/There always too much of everything/and there's always not enough."
The plodding bass eventually erupts into a swagger, eventually descending into all-out mandess amidst screams of "Phyliss! What have you done to the house?!?"
This is the clear complexity of Apollo Sunshine: melding playful ditties with avant garde noise rock as if the band was discovering the mysteries of quantum physics and jotting down the revelations on beer coasters for safe keeping. On Apollo Sunshine these ideas find a permanent home, but it is live on stage they pack the most impact.
Such a strong impression they make, it's worth finishing the story of my Holiday Season '04. After Thanksgiving, the next time I saw my mother was Christmas, when I drove home to Ohio after my flight home was cancelled. There, I found she had come into owning two rabbits; she only needed one. So, with my unexpected land-transportation back to New York City, I decided to bring back a bunny. Her name?
Phyliss.
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:: 07:39 Monday 13 Febvfsdagvsdfgb