After close to 30 years and something in the vicinity of 50 albums, this is apparently the final studio record by the uncategorizable trio Sun City Girls, recorded at their last sessions before drummer Charles Gocher's 2007 death. (Multi-instrumentalists Richard and Alan Bishop did one final tour in 2008 as the Brothers Unconnected, playing material from the SCG songbook, then called it quits.) They made a career out of being unpredictable: If you'd heard the miraculous pancultural freakout of Torch of the Mystics (everyone's favorite SCG album, unforgivably long out of print) and then picked up the sluggish comedy record Jacks Creek, or discovered them through the Fugs-ian ranty-shanties of Horse Cock Phepner and followed that with the space-drone of Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings, you might have wondered if there were a bunch of different bands calling themselves Sun City Girls. (I'd point neophytes toward the albums that displayed multiple sides of the band, like Kaliflower or Carnival Folklore Resurrection Radio, but those are long-gone too.)
So for their final bow, it's fitting that they took another left turn, this time into overt prettiness. In some ways, Funeral Mariachi is a return to a couple of the modes where they seemed most comfortable-- and this was a band that was usually much more interested in discomfort, even their own. One is pastiches of non-Anglophone folk forms, with singing in made-up languages (sort of an extension of Can's "Ethnological Forgery Series"); "The Imam" and "Black Orchid" would've fit right in on Torch of the Mystics. The other is film music, specifically in the tradition of Ennio Morricone. "Come Maddalena" is a Morricone cover, and "Blue West" and "Mineral Wells" might as well be.
Sun City Girls recorded a bunch of "soundtracks" over the years-- Juggernaut, Dulce, Piasa... Devourer of Men-- although Mister Lonely is the only movie they scored that demonstrably exists any place other than their record sleeves. But Funeral Mariachi doesn't need a framing device to evoke an imaginary Jodorowsky movie. Unidentifiable instruments slither in and out of the mix; rhythms trudge like mules along a dirt road. Anything you think you hear might be a lie or an illusion. "When I was dead I looked exactly like you/ Now I'm alive where nothing is true," the Bishops purr on "This Is My Name", one of only a couple of songs with much in the way of English lyrics.
The Girls boys always had a very weird sense of humor, and there are a few odd little jokes here: "Bens Radio" begins and ends with a terrific bit of studio trickery, volleying snippets of voices across the stereo field, as if channel-surfing, and the unutterably lovely "El Solo" alternates Morricone-esque vocalese with halting phrases from a loud, old piano. Mostly, though, the shock of Funeral Mariachi is that it's the friendliest record in their catalogue. It doesn't have the twitching intensity of a lot of their other work-- that's both an asset and a deficit-- but they couldn't have made a sweeter farewell.
