The long career of Arizona’s trio Sun City Girls went in every direction you could imagine, and many you probably couldn’t. Starting with a blast of hardcore-adjacent DIY cassettes, the band expanded its palette quickly, planting big, muddy footprints all over tons of styles and genres, some inherited and some invented. Mixing cross-cultural influences, sharp instrumental chops, and pranksterish jokes, Sun City Girls’ music (and insanely prolific release schedule) could make you wonder not only how they did it, but what exactly “it” was—and whether even they knew.
The brothers who launched Sun City Girls, Alan and Rick Bishop, started making solo albums while their band was in full flight, and continued apace after the passing of drummer Charlie Gocher, in 2007, marked the trio’s end. Rick, as Sir Richard Bishop, has primarily concentrated on his masterful guitar playing, in both solo and full-band scenarios. Alan, meanwhile, has crafted a discography that’s nearly as weird and winding as that of his former band, frequently under the alias Alvarius B. (a reference to a legendary psychedelic toad). He’s veered from outsider rants as Uncle Jim to cryptic lo-fi acoustic guitar, creepy outsider folk, masterful one-man weirdo pop, and stunning, reverent covers of songs by Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, and more.
Along the way, Bishop’s explorations have naturally overlapped with territory mapped by Sun City Girls, particularly in his enduring interest in non-Western sounds (which finds a further outlet in Sublime Frequencies, the wide-ranging archival label he cofounded). But until now, there hadn’t been an Alvarius B. album that you could point to as a plainly Sun City Girls-style record. Malarial Dream, made with the help of some skilled compatriots (including fellow members of Bishop’s band Invisible Hands), is the closest thing to what SCG might be doing if they were still around today. Across one ballad and seven instrumentals, psych, folk, and obscure sounds mix with straight-up rock’n’roll in ways preceded both by SCG’s most recognizable classic,1990’s Torch of the Mystics, and their more refined posthumous finale, 2010’s Funeral Mariachi.
Malarial Dream actually starts with a song called “Rock N’ Roll” (written by Bishop’s longtime collaborator Sam Shalabi), a burst of twangy riffage that gets right to the point and brings it home quickly. Such a blastoff makes it tempting to call this a statement album, a back-to-basics showcase of Alvarius B. at his most electrifying. But nothing is ever quite that simple with Bishop. The rest of Malarial Dream maintains the opener’s energy while also diving into shadows. Indeed, the second track, “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin - Part 2,” is much murkier: a seven-minute journey through dusty guitar licks, ritualistic rhythms, and instruments such as the quanun and the darbuka.
As hypnotic as “Multiple Hallucinations” is, it’s also rather astonishingly arranged and precisely played. As he’s made more solo recordings, Bishop has become more skilled (or perhaps just more interested) in fine-tuning his music, retaining a spirit of discovery without losing control. Much of his past work was uncontrolled in great ways, but it’s equally fascinating to hear him lead a group through carefully written, meticulously executed songs. The gently wistful “Later” evokes the Western film scores of Ennio Morricone, while the seemingly improvised “Texas Headphones” slowly morphs into a cutting jam, and the delicately plucked “One Month Non-Sexual Vacation in Mongolia” is a hymn-like showcase for Shalabi’s aching oud playing.
Perhaps the most surprising part of Malarial Dream is its closer, “Unfinished Business.” The entire album seems to have led to this poignant piece, which opens with a slow guitar figure, fades to silence, then becomes a rising rock journey you could imagine Jack Black singing over on a Tenacious D. album. But this is no joke, nor a cheesy, sentimental closure. Instead, as Bishop’s mountain-climbing bassline gets washed by Cherif El-Masri’s guitar and Amelle Legrand’s swelling cello, you can imagine the band riding off into the distance in search of whatever excellent music lies beyond the horizon.
