Just Another 'Static' Sunday

In the three years between their debut album Reading, Writing & Arithmetic (1989) and their sophomore release Blind (1992), the Sundays must have been compared with every rock and roll act from Joni Mitchell to The Cure. Music critics praised the quartet's lyrical "atmosphere," paralleling it with the Cocteau Twins' vocal texture, 10,000 Maniacs' ethereal instrumentation and The Smiths' all-around indie dynamism. When The Sundays accompanied Belly on their 1990-91 tour of the UK, the two female vocalists naturally became the focus of similar scrutiny: whereas Belly's frontwoman Tanya Donelly balanced her more direct and powerful voice against mysterious and effervescent orchestration, The Sundays' Harriet Wheeler used her gentler tone to sing the audience lullabies instead.

The public adulation--and its efforts to compartmentalize The Sundays--gradually ceased in the years after Blind, as Wheeler and her cronies ceded the spotlight to similarly-styled groups like The Cranberries and Stereolab. If The Sundays were compared to anyone during that sad, dark period, it was probably another band that had passed into similar "whatever happened to...?" oblivion.

That five-year hiatus has officially ended with Static and Silence.

In the last few years, Wheeler and Sundays guitar man David Gavurin have begun raising a family; simultaneously, they have birthed some exceptionally creative and poetic songs, and have imbued them with the kind of swirly, impressionistic backup that only five years of perfectionism can accomplish.

Old-school Sundays fans will react to Static and Silence in one of two ways: they'll either love it because it's such classic and familiar material or they'll love it because it puts an original spin on the same tried-and-true Sundays product. On the one hand, the old mellow ambiance is there, along with the familiar existentialist love themes: "a butterfly in the wind is drifting like I do/it's dumb--I know what I want to say/but I can't even take one breath." On the other hand, a plethora of extra instrumentation helps the quartet explore these comfortable themes more fully than they could in their guitar based pieces. The numerous string parts on "Cry," for instance, cooperate to create an aural combination of soft weeping and more vehement sobs, and add a mournful nuance to otherwise unprofound lyrics. In much the same way, the flute arrangement on "Your Eyes" augments the nomadic gypsy rhythm of the song itself, and horns on "I Can't Wait" mirror the impatience and expectation of the lyrics. Meanwhile, keyboard accompaniment lends an original flavor to the rest of the standard Sundays fare.

The arrangements, in combination with the lyrics, also convey a greater artistic maturity: any pop fluff that sweetened the band's previous releases has been replaced with a pastoral gentleness and "a bittersweet taste of a time and another place before." "Leave This City," the song that concretely conveys this disillusionment, is a depiction of an urban neighborhood as an Audrey Hepburn character would see it. One can picture Holly Golightly's jaded visage at the "boarded-up...cinema" lamenting the "strawberry dreams & the dust-filled beams/shut down in a modern town." "Another Flavour" is perhaps the largest exception to the mature mellowness of the rest of the album. Its edge and high-energy pacing shows Tanya Donelly's influence on some of the Sundays' stylings.

Of course, there's also "Summertime," the first single on Static and Silence and "that song" everyone brings up when the Sundays are mentioned. "Summertime" has a contagiously hummable chorus but completely indiscernible verse lyrics, which is a shame because, as the most upbeat and melodious of the album's songs, the track is also one of its deepest and most poetic. It begins by painting a honeymoon postcard picture, complete with a "romantic Piscean," an "angel in disguise" and a Poconos-style "heart-shaped hotel room." This image is then contrasted with the situation of those born into circumstances hidden from Western eyes: "but all I see is films where a colourless despair/meant angry young men with immaculate hair." Throughout the song, though, the pop tempo is maintained, obscuring the darkness of the lyrics and perhaps mirroring the precarious joy of the honeymooners who are ignorant of the suffering of others a world or a few generations away.

Static and Silence may not place The Sundays above comparison, but the album succeeds in changing the basis of that comparison. In fact, many critics are now comparing The Sundays to Van Morrison, who came out of presumed retirement time and time again with finely-crafted mystical masterpieces. Gavurin has remarked that the five-year hiatus, in combination with the opportunity to work out of their own homes, enabled The Sundays to experiment within their genre; he also feels that the Van Morrison comparison is accurate, because the product was well worth the wait.

Even the Sundays' lyrics seem to support the two halves of this proposition: one of the lines from "Folk Song" ("it stoned me to my soul") is a near-replication of a Van Morrison lyric. In addition, "I Can't Wait" alludes to the necessity of a creative vacation in order to produce a better recording in the end: "when there's more in your head than you find in your life/calls for a change."

"I Can't Wait" simultaneously recognizes what The Sundays themselves might not understand--that fans in a fickle market may be unwilling to "wait/forever/...the days & the hours & the years...turning in [their] minds," in expectation of a product five years in the making. The Sundays' response to this fair-weathered support? A skillfully crafted masterpiece of musical subtlety and lyrical symbolism--and an admonition that patience is necessary if listeners want more of the same in the future.