Having gone from high school acoustic DIY punk to homeless Venice boardwalk busker to acclaimed folk/blues-rooted singer/songwriter, Sunny War flings poison-tipped arrows on her startlingly personal new album — many pointing right at her, some already having found flesh. Largely written in her Los Angeles apartment with the lights off and empty bottles surrounding her after a breakup, the songs grapple with depression, addiction, and love’s death, yet are inviting in their darkness. The tone is set with opener “Love’s Death Bed,” its gloom floating on cascades of deft fingerpicking and spirited, gospel-like call-and-response with a chorus including guest Allison Russell.
The mix of frank emotions and engaging tones continues throughout, from spritely group sings to muted solitary contemplation. There’s fire too: a cover of Ween’s “Baby Bitch” features a children’s chorus (in truth, three adult men with voices sped up, Chipmunks-style) singing “Fuck you, you stinking asshole.
“I feel like there are two sides of me,” says the now Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.” That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative “Anarchist Gospel”, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out.
Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments. She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song.
Because it promises not healing but resilience and perseverance, because it doesn’t take shit for granted, “Anarchist Gospel” holds up under such intense emotional pressure, acknowledging the pain of living while searching for something that lies just beyond ourselves, some sense of balance between the bad and the good.
credits
released February 3, 2023
The Fat Angel Sings 