“Bad Dream Jaguar” is a collection of songs threading their way through the uncertainty. The Austin band made the album during a period of dislocation: guitarist Stephen Salisbury moved from Texas to North Carolina in 2020, changing the nature of his creative (and romantic) relationship with singer and bandleader Laura Colwell until she joined him in 2022. The dozen tracks on “Bad Dream Jaguar” seek to make sense of that distance, their solitude and, in an overarching way, a fractured nostalgia for what had come before—and the often painful work of letting it go.
The first two minutes of Sun June’s third album, “Bad Dream Jaguar,” is a reverie – Laura Colwell’s voice floats above a slow-burn, sparse synth sound, conjuring a tipsy loneliness, a hazy recollection, a disco ball spinning at the end of the night for an empty dancefloor. Sun June’s music often feels like a shared memory – the details so close to the edge of a song that you can touch them. And as an Austin-based project, their music has also always felt strangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives across an impossible expanse of openness, refractions shimmering off the pavement in the heat.
But on “Bad Dream Jaguar”, Sun June is unmoored. The back drop of Texas is replaced by longing, by distance, by transience, and aquiet fear. The only sense of certainty comes from the murky past.It’s a dispatch from aging, when you’re in the strange in-betweenof yourself: there’s a clear image of the person you once wereand the places you inhabited, generational curses and our fami-lies, but the future feels vast, unclear – and the present can’t help but slip through your fingers.
There’s a mix of hi-fi and lo-fi; some songs, like “Texas,” whichthe band had to learn at a breakneck pace ahead of their record-ing session, was recorded on a first take, live in the room, while “Eager” and “Easy Violence” feature early vocal takes from Colwell, the final songs built atop the demos. The latter track details staying up all night, being a menace to society, falling into bad patterns, but is followed by “John Prine,” a drumless, piano-based ballad, a mash of pedal steel manipulated to sound closer to synths.
Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease. The layers on “Bad Dream Jaguar” don’t tangle but they float, sheaths of divergent and luminescent sonics hanging together as the sun goes down, darkness seeping in. The record exists in the chasm between giving up and going all-in. And a flicker of quiet confidence powering through, a small hopeful glow at its core.
It’s a subtle album, built around gentle, dream-like musical arrangements that belie the tougher sentiments underpinning these songs. The narrators here are often trying to figure out where they stand, in relation to a significant other, themselves, the past, the future. “You were searching for a reason to be mad / Babe, I got plenty of them,” Colwell sings on “Mixed Bag,” her soft voice wrapped in layers of guitar, ghostly backing vocals and a piano vamp that lands just so between lyrics.
Befitting an album that took shape around a long-distance relationship, there’s a lot of road imagery on “Bad Dream Jaguar”. Colwell sings about long drives and headlights in the distance, and the lyrics often play like the reveries that blossom between the highway lines on road trips. She lets her mind wander through remembered scenes and settings that have the feel of creased snapshots she found tucked away in the glove compartment. Colwell is fighting to stay awake behind the wheel, and true to herself, while singing along in the car on “John Prine.” On “Washington Square,” her narrator is remembering when she and a partner were young and foolish “back when all the things to come hadn’t yet,” while “Sage” finds her holding tight to glimpses of the past while staving off the melancholy of a solitary present
Released 20/10/2023
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