In the world of Olivia Tremor Control spinoffs, Bill Doss' The Sunshine Fix has fancied itself the fun and poppy counterpart to the dark, experimental tendencies of Will Cullen Hart's Circulatory System. The problem with this is that they've never been fun, nor particularly interesting. Drenching their previous releases in blindingly bright, caramel-saccharine glee, The Sunshine Fix are psychedelic Fred Penners making clumsy attempts at approximating Beatles production-- they even frequently crib Lennon/McCartney tracks note-for-note.
Green Imagination, The Sunshine Fix's latest release, convicts Doss and company once more of shamelessly aping as many of the Fab Four's post-Help! trademarks as they're likely to get away with. To their credit, however, they occasionally throw a curveball: Careful dusting occasionally reveals the prints of Keith Richards' sticky fingers on Green Imagination as well, marking the first time the band has ever dared to venture outside the Magical Mystery realm. In fact, were there any trace of the innovation and easy genius these artists routinely exhibited, The Sunshine Fix might actually be onto something. Unfortunately, given the influences they've drawn from, The Sunshine Fix's returns are awfully unrewarding.
Green Imagination does awkwardly stumble into some redeeming moments, but never without a slog through the banal first. The short opener "Statues and Glue" showers itself in yellowed vocal harmonies, lulling listeners with its mundane chord progressions, until a simple but powerful bass and drum breakdown is introduced, slashed on the offbeat by Doss' upstroke. "What Do You Know" is an abridged version of Black Foliage's "A Sleepy Company", trading the latter's devilish string parts and general oddballery for flat-out gimmicky flanged guitar lines and scrambled vocals-- but while the call-and-response between Doss and his "What do you know?" chorus initially cloys, the closing refrain recompenses, as Doss fights against ascending vocal harmonies and a children's choir. Which is maybe what's so frustrating about Green Imagination: Doss clearly knows how to craft challenging yet accessible passages, and it's a shame he so often settles for compositional truisms.
Another hurdle that The Sunshine Fix could stand to clear is their tendency towards pop overload. When Doss fails to find an interesting melody, he seems to think that simply stuffing tracks with an unwieldy number of boring ones will solve the problem. Tracks like "Extraordinary/Ordinary" prove just the opposite. The falsetto melody that opens this track is maybe the most remarkable parody of Carl Newman's songwriting prowess I've heard, and the rest of the song is content to congeal into a mess of flaccid horn bops, guitar slides, and wispy harmonies. Starlight Mints send-up "Afterglow" and Rolling Stones town-carnival tribute "Face the Ghost" make it all the more clear that Green Imagination desperately wants to be loved-- and obnoxiously so. Doss' blues affectations, and each track's transparent recourse to some goofy "we're totally fun!" trope (see: the addition of harmonica and/or "Twist and Shout"-style chord builds) are, in fact, not totally fun, but wholeheartedly infuriating.
Let's pass over the John Lennon-does-country sleeper "Rx", the TV mini-drama theme "Enjoy Your Teeth", and "Runaway Run" (the latter a possible successor to Beavis and Butthead's "Lesbian Seagulls"). Maybe the only truly worthwhile track on Green Imagination is the closer, "Sunday Afternoon". The catchy stop/start guitar riff initially keeps the short song's energy level high, but soon, some fantastic multi-part vocals steal the spotlight: While sweeping guitar lines and oohs/ahhs are pushed to the front of the mix, two massively catchy vocal melodies trade fire across the stereo in the background, the tenors on one side, the bass on the other. This production technique would seem to contradict common sense, but it works extremely well here-- and if nothing else, it leaves those who can even get through the entirety of Green Imagination with a nice consolation prize.
