Bad Dream Jaguar: Transparent Purple Vinyl LP

The first two minutes of Sun June’s third album, Bad Dream Jag-uar, is a reverie - Laura Colwell’s voice floats above a slow-burn,sparse synth, 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 feltstrangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives acrossan 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 helpbut 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 Col-well, the final songs built atop the demos. The latter track detailsstaying up all night, being a menace to society, falling into badpatterns, but is followed by “John Prine,” a drumless, piano-basedballad, a mash of pedal steel manipulated to sound closer to synths.

Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy soundingin the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured founda-tion 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 smallhopeful glow at its core. 

Tracklist:
Side A
1. Eager
2. 16 Riders
3. Mixed Bag
4. Moon Ahead
5. Ambitions
6. Easy Violence

Side B
1. John Prine
2. Sage
3. Washington Square
4. Get Enough
5. Texas
6. Lightning