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Vice Blog

REVIEWS - SUN CITY GIRLS REISSUE PARADE

Oh hey. The Sun City Girls have finally started rereleasing some of their old, completely-fucking- impossible-to-find 90s stuff on CD. I'd assumed that I'd have to hand off my battered old bootleg tape of Torch of the Mystics to my grandchildren from my deathbed, but this is going to make things a hell of a lot easier (if less romantic/dorky). Let's see what'all we got…


The first two, Juggernaut and its sister album Piasa… Devourer of Men, are what I'd describe as the closest thing to the "classic Sun City Girls sound," if someone were holding a gun to my head. The songs are all over the place (as in literally, geographically all over the place) and incorporate anything from gamelans to sehnais to what sounds like maybe a broken honky-tonk? Fuck, it's really kind of difficult to write about their music without sounding like an idiot. Suffice it to say if you're a casual fan of SGC or the Sublime Frequencies stuff, these guys'll probably be the most up your alley.
Then there's Jack's Creek, which progresses from a ten-minute acapella hillbilly rant into a bunch of different variations on Americanan-sounding business punctuated by, and in some cases overdubbed with, further ranting. If you're the kind of person who takes extended zit-popping breaks in the bathroom at work and has a hard time looking people in the eye, believe you me, this is some pretty ideal whistle-along-loudly-to-your-headphones material. Otherwise it's good for quietly bugging out with some pals in your apartment at the end of the night.
The real gem of the lot though is Dulce, Sun City Girl's purported soundtrack for a never-released sci-fi/western epic shot on camcorder by a member of Aum Shinrikyo (the Japanese supervillain cult). I don't know why they wouldn't have just asked leader Shoko Asahara to drum something up (his own music even kind of sounds like some weird Sun City digression), but the score SGC came up with for those nutbars is possibly their most cohesive collection of music, atmosphere-wise. Everything's really dark and eerily soft, with weird metallic noises humming in out of nowhere and frazzling your nerves. It's also got, hands down, one of the best oboe-scat jams of all time. What's really nice about the whole deal—or what we think's nice in any case—is instead of going the deluxe-edition route and gumming up the albums with outtakes and bonus DVDs (read: unsellable live footage), they left them exactly how they looked and sounded when they first came out: cavey, barcodeless, and awesome. If you pull out the inlays and tape them together into a "sleeve" for the disc, you can even pretend you're a giant who's also a savvy record collector from ten year's ago. Not that I'd know!

In any case, you probably already know whether or not you're going to be into these. All I can do at this point is say is "Yes, you really really should get them—they're great" and be nervous you think I'm sad. The rest of you don't matter anyway. Oh and you should buy them all here where they're cheap and the money goes straight to the brothers Bishop.

CORKY MINDOWS