In February 2007, Charles Gocher, drummer for Sun City Girls, died of cancer. Alan and Richard Bishop, the trio's bassist and guitarist, respectively, retired the band's name after 25 years of recording. Gocher's death spawned at least one hard, unromantic fact: One of the hairiest discographies in indie music wouldn't get any bigger. Quality control not only wasn't the group's forte, it was posited as antithetical to their ethic, an affront to spontaneity. Editing responsibilities were, essentially, left to the listener. This is an admirable line to toe as an artist and an obnoxious one to force on a consumer. The band has about 20 albums to choose from if you're buying new; counting used bins, eBay, and purloined stuffing from clandestine sources, it's closer to 50.
But part of their genius was their anti-commercial commercialism. They recorded compulsively and released a substantial portion of what they recorded. Sun City Girls promotional discs tend to come directly from Alan Bishop. They're a cottage industry: They'll never grow outside of the house, but they're not too bashful or precious to work their product like a mule.
The other part of their genius was their style. Sun City Girls' music might be most succinctly described as pan-ethnic folk played as trebly, half-improvised punk rock. But even that's a detrimental redux. Better to say they auditioned just about every guitar-based sound you'd never hear on a "pop" record with agility, humor, and focus so intense it often slipped into sounding cross-eyed. The writer Byron Coley once said that without them, all underground music would sound like Merzbow. Blender noise. Not a pleasant thought. But Coley's comment was as much about attitude as sound. Sun City Girls' sense of showmanship was the snake-oil salesman's or a circus performer's more than the artist's. It was flashy and full of mysterious bullshit. It was based on mutual suspension of belief, on the idea that they were shamanic conduits bearing deep-ass mysteries in their rucksacks to produce to their audience like rare gems or exotic birds.
Jack's Creek, Piasa...Devourer of Men, and Juggernaut were all out of print before this past fall. It's not like SCG to reissue, but now that Gocher's gone, it's not surprising that they're willing to till the catalog a little more before quieting down. Ostensibly, Jack's Creek is the band's Americana record. Given their treatments of non-Western music, the prospect is interesting. The results, though, are ironic. It's unlistenable. Bad. Why they'd re-release it over other out-of-print SCG albums is beyond me. Juggernaut and Piasa are both soundtracks, and in turn both explore the quieter, less intrusive sides of their music. Piasa fares better. SCG could never really assimilate to a background, though, and that's one of the nice things about listening to Piasa-- it's a mood record that errs on the side of getting your attention rather than making itself invisible. It's also an album where the band gave full reign to their timbral experimentation, incorporating Asian horns, metal percussion, hand drums, and acoustic guitars into a sound that usually prided itself on the economy of the rock trio.
Tackling Sun City Girls in a review is essentially exhausting. Some releases are better than others. It's hard to imagine someone liking one album and finding nothing in the rest of their catalog to appreciate. I couldn't even say that these few reissues are particularly worth it, save Piasa. As callous as it might be to say, it's nice to be able to start thinking about SCG in retrospect--even on the weakest moments in these three records, evidence of their influence on modern underground music is apparent and, at times, even overwhelming. And while the Sun City Girls are a band more likely to get brainlessly name-checked than actually listened to, well, that's immaterial-- the curious vagaries of influence. I could certainly think of worse figureheads.
