The Czech Republic band Sunshine is a colliding force of art music, synth-heavy broken dance beats, and punk fury that lends earnest credence to the idea that everything old is new again. Only, this sort of retro refitting is done much better when born of the naïveté that only those who have been cut off from widespread modern American culture can possibly have. Sunshine responds to the idea of punk through the fractured bits of rock and roll and pop culture that were able to slip under the chaotic walls of collapsed politics that dominate their region of the "New World." The band's latest disc,
Velvet Suicide, takes the weirdest stab at the glam genre you'll likely ever hear and focuses itself through a pop-culture obsession, seemingly learned through the pages of American magazines. An obvious model fixation and songs titled "The Stardust Angel," "Glamour Jenny's Song," "The Picture of Anorexic Beauty," and "Porn Orchid" are fed by an odd mix of sonic reducing guitar splatter, whirring synthesized new wave, shattered staccato drum beats, and virtually no grasp of the English language. Yet
Velvet Suicide sounds as good or better than most of Sunshine's American contemporaries who actually know the culture and speak the language. The band's weird, distorted view of a wider pop edification gives a more pertinent if skewed indictment of the climate we live in than, perhaps, someone who has always lived in and become immune to American pop culture.
