The arc of Sun City Girls’ 26-year history was long, but it bent toward chaos. Their music was an unpredictable pile-up of rock, pop, jazz, blues, psych, noise, improv, and many far-flung global sounds—with special love for the music of the Middle East—delivered as ballads, jams, rants, plays, and pranks. Their dual passions for playing whatever they felt like and confounding any audience who would listen dovetailed perfectly, such that even their biggest fans can cite Sun City Girls moments that they found baffling or even off-putting.
This penchant for messiness helps explain why 1990’s Torch of the Mystics is Sun City Girls’ most famous and perhaps best-loved album. The most surprising aspect of this record is how well arranged and engaging the music is. Though the trio had roots in the Arizona hardcore scene of the early '80s, no one ever pegged them as purveyors of three chords and the truth, especially given the rambling releases that preceded Torch. But the three-chord riff that launches album opener "Blue Mamba" couldn't be more direct, and remains Sun City Girls’ biggest-ever earworm.
Torch of the Mystics is replete with moments like that—nuggets of hypnotic tunefulness stretched into songs that feel as classic and well-worn as the dusty cassettes the band uncovered on their travels around the globe (later mined for compilations on bassist/singer Alan Bishop’s Sublime Frequencies label). You can actually whistle along to most of Torch’s songs—one even starts with Bishop whistling the melody for you—and even the farthest-out tunes have discernible shapes that quickly burn into memory.
The most immediate images come from the guitar of Alan Bishop’s younger brother Rick. Earlier Sun City Girls albums hinted at his instrumental prowess, but it’s on full display on Torch of the Mystics. His playing isn’t about technical know-how or honed chops—though he clearly has both of those—but rather finding epiphanies in repetition. The curling chords of "Esoterica of Abyssynia" are so dizzying they seem to fold in on themselves, like a musical Möbius strip. Similar effects spin from the warped strings of "Radar 1941", which sounds like a water-logged surf tune that washed up from the other side of the planet.
An equal counterpart to Rick’s guitar is the malleable voice of his sibling, Alan. The Bishops’ worldly travels clearly gave Alan an ear for all manner of singing styles, and on Torch he displays the vocal capabilities to match them. At times he sounds like he’s channeling ghosts of singers past, as in the worshipful warble of "Space Prophet Dogon" or the strikingly-beautiful scale-riding of "The Shining Path". The latter is a cover of Bolivian folk song "Llorando se feu", and Sun City Girls’ treatment is typical of their magical way with covers. It retains the stirring mood of the original while transposing it to a more mysterious, fantastical realm (in this case, one haunted by the Spaghetti Western scores of Bishop hero Ennio Morricone). Yet as breathtaking as his singing can be, some of Alan’s most moving vocal performances come when he yells, hums, and moans, reaching for a higher plane while simultaneously conveying pristine beauty.
That pursuit is all over Torch of the Mystics, and a big part of what makes it great. It’s as much about the profundity of disorder as the clarity of structure. Though the latter may be more obvious on first listen, dig in deep and the trio’s love of surprise and confusion emerge loudly. Many tracks teeter on the edge of explosion, straddling the line between inspiration and insanity. Four of the songs were completely improvised, and all were recorded in single takes, but the album’s unity emerges from the band’s persistent vision. Torch of the Mystics finds a point at which chaos and order meet to become a third path—one that, in this thrilling and still-vital incarnation, only Sun City Girls could discover.
