An even bigger mess
Sunburned is the classic sophomore release that erroneously conflates bigger with better. This power duo’s self-titled debut was already a mess, mixing Americana with garage rock and half a dozen other genres for huge swells. Furthermore, it was most tolerable on slimmer songs like “Without Walls” that let Jeff Gorman have some room to breathe and let his earnestness shine through. Sadly, the duo’s penchant for hap-hazard genre-splicing is cranked up to even more unwieldy levels as the band searches for a musical and lyrical identity.
There are about 10 seconds of any Illiterate Light song that is enjoyable. It will be a different 10 seconds every time. They are trying to pull from every possible indie rock and Americana flavor. There are the clanging acoustic guitars opening up the album on “Wake up Now,” the bubbling synths on “Heaven Bends,” and the sudden pattering groove of “Hellraiser.” Occasionally, a tone will emerge as gorgeous and worthy of attention. The pretty fingerpicked break halfway through “Closer” is nothing short of stunning, and the fluorescent pan flutes opening up “Automatic” deserved more than a supporting role.
Despite the various openings of each song, they all undergo some sort of convergent evolution towards craggy, feedback-heavy blasts or solos that are going for anthemic power. This was an issue with their debut, but even that album had the occasional coherent song like “Carolina Lorelei” that worked from beginning to end. The sudden fondness for stiff programmed percussion removes any momentum. Transitions from gentle to harsh in “Luckiest Man Alive” and “Heaven Bends” are sloppy and ineffective. While Gorman delivers a great pissed-off snarl on “Feb 1st,” he does not have the raw power to work with these attempts at a crescendo. Sunburned ends up wildly dissonant yet repetitive at the same time as a result.
The band’s struggle with identity carries over into the writing. The primary setting is religiously themed brooding angst without enough compelling imagery or gripping performances to support it. The debut’s best moments came with songs like “Nuthin’s Fair” and “I Wanna Leave America,” which focused the burnout with a political lens and a sudden sense of wit and irony with lines like “I wanna leave America / But I don’t know where to go / I wanna be an outlaw / But I don’t want to be alone.”
The most compelling moments on Sunburned similarly stand out in tone and content. “Hellraiser” suddenly goes with cheeky lines like “I’m a virgin / I mean Virgo” that feel out of place with the band’s typical humorless misery. By some miracle, it produces the most compelling character piece; an awkward protagonist too meek to escape a relationship with someone far more intense and thrill-seeking, symbolized by their partner’s fondness for horror movies like Hellraiser. In contrast, the protagonist hides in the covers from the gore and torture. Similarly, “Fuck LA” is heavy-handed and grinds its one interesting lyrical conceit into the ground. Still, there’s something cathartic to its stream of profanity as a long-distance girlfriend cusses out the singer for leaving her alone while he tours the country.
Neither of these two songs is perfect, but they are fresh air amidst a fog of nebulous trauma yet predictable development. It tries to handle themes of light and darkness, finding hope in misery. The album is bookended by two broadly sketched tracks, “Wake Up Now” and “Luckiest Man Alive.” The former discusses dealing with personal demons and bluntly proclaims, “I know I’ve reached the edge / And I’m not getting better.” At the same time, the latter is a love song directed towards someone who helps them through all the pain. It’s okay for these two songs to be surface-level, with an introduction on one end and an epilogue on the other. Still, there needs to be more in the interim to make the arc compelling. As much as the protagonist seems to hate himself, there’s little deconstruction as to why. Vague allusions are made to alcohol abuse or panic attacks, which are supposed to be enough insight into the roots of the self-flagellation. The listener is left to fill in the blanks left by these familiar tropes.
Something compelling is buried beneath these interchangeable second halves and underwhelming lyrics. Still, it will take a while for Illiterate Light to work through the rubble and stop getting in their own way.
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