Fun Machine

Sonnenhuhn

(BNS)

Record Review by Alex Pudlin

It’s very frustrating when a band is unaware of its own strengths and weaknesses. This naïvety is often the mark of a new band, so young and eager to prove themselves. So it should come as no surprise that Sonnenhuhn is New Jersey neo-proggers Fun Machine’s debut album. For all its adventurous spirit and unpredictable musical turns, it’s the unfocused nature of the band’s sound that unfortunately stays in your ears long after the album has ended.

Sonnenhuhn begins with nearly two minutes of waves, white noises, doors slamming and foot steps that segue into the album’s first proper song, “Blok People.”  This opus gets the album off to an exhilarating start. Drones of keyboards and feedback give way to short guitar freakouts before returning to more feedback ambience. A keyboard bounces in the mix, almost sounding like a schoolyard taunt. When you least expect it, the entire song shifts into a soulful groove. What at first seems formless and even random reveals its structure over the course of nine minutes. And when some sloppy but impassioned vocals come out of nowhere, they arrive like a well-earned cathartic purge. Sadly, nowhere else on the album do all these elements coalesce quite so neatly.

“Lost in Glasgow” has some addictive little synth-arpeggios interspersed throughout the track, but the driving beat and guitar pyrotechnics grow anemic over time. Likewise, “Blok 1” relies too heavily on vocals and organ than drown out the rest of the mix. The song’s lite-jazz breakdown is a pleasant detour but feels more tacked on than “Blok People’s” twists and turns. It’s the album’s centerpiece, “Family Vapor,” where Fun Machine’s various parts smash into a mid-air collision. At 15 minutes, “Family Vapor” overstays its welcome by several minutes. The vocals, while a bit tough on the ears for most of the album, start to become genuinely obnoxious and tuneless. Everything that “Blok People” gets right, “Family Vapor” gets wrong. It all feels improvised with the worst implications of the term. The song meanders from show-boating musicianship to a creepy guitar and synth interlude without any real motive for doing so. At a quarter of the length, these ideas could’ve been interesting but at a quarter of the whole album’s length it’s something akin to an overcooked piece of salmon that ruins the delicious wasabi mashed potatoes and short rib potstickers that came before it.

Luckily, if you deselect “Blok 1” and "Family Vapor" from your playlist, you’ll be left with some more better than average numbers. “Liquid Pants” feels like The Battles re-imagined as a Bar Mitzvah band; “Flaking Reality” is a new-wave, almost ska-pop number that is the catchiest (and shortest) thing here; and “Rope Swing” lowers the vocals to a much more tolerable level and balances the whininess out with some down-tempo Rhodes and guitar licks.