Last I heard, the Marshall Tucker Band and Molly Hatchet had each been banished to their own respective state and county fair circuits, allowed to play no further than 100 yards from the nearest ring-toss or cotton candy machine. This was right and just. But apparently, someone out there interpreted their absence from the recording studio as an abhorrent vacuum that must be filled, lest the universe lose precious balance.
Enter The Suntanama, who seem to be filling in for both of those bands on their self-titled debut, right down to the flute-inflected knock-off blues. They even have three guys who play guitar (albeit not always at the same time). I seem to remember, in the late 90s, everyone looking around trying to find "The American Radiohead", a pursuit that proved fruitless. I'm fairly certain that I never heard of anyone seeking "The American Gomez", but I have definitely just inadvertently discovered it. To their credit, The Suntanama focus only on one sound, tackling it with apparent feeling instead of grasping at genre-bending straws in the manner of their UK colleagues, but the result is still largely the same: limp, unpalatable blues "rock".
At the center of a concentric ring of problems lies vocalist Darren Zoltowski, whose voice is powerful in all the wrong ways. He can project well, but in doing so, he tramples any semblance of coherence he may have otherwise had. For the sake of mathematical simplicity, let's assume there are exactly 100 words of lyric on this album. Out of that, you may be able to understand roughly 13. And of those, probably 12 of them would be in track two, "And So the Story Goes", where Zoltowski sings something about carrying a heavy load and something to the effect of, "I'll benawonatyoucahh lean onaahhh". Usually, he just wails in his gravelly way, mouthing syllables that never amount to anything you could get points off in a Scrabble match.
Zoltowski is abetted by a quintet that plugs away with a remarkable lack of focus-- a decent little groove pops up now and then, but the guitars take more noodle time in a day than the whole population of Thailand. Oddly, when Zoltowski clams up at the end of "Corduroy Lawsuit", finally throwing the spotlight to the guitars, they shy away from playing anything that sounds too soloish, almost as if they're afraid they may actually come up with something good. The song putters to a limp close that evokes the Allman Brothers playing through the nastiest coke haze of their lives. No, scratch that-- Duane Allman could play with more conviction than this if you broke his fingers.
And there you have it. Not much going on in the land of The Suntanama. Even the formidable producer/engineer combo of Neil Michael Hagerty and Brian Paulson couldn't coax any life out of these proceedings. Seriously, if you're looking to hear a bunch of white guys try their hands at some routine blues stuff, go pick up a Canned Heat album. Meanwhile, look for The Suntanama on the marquee at your next three-town fair.
