Sun Club: The Dongo Durango
Baltimore group Sun Club have toured extensively since their inception, filling venues of all sizes with their raucous indie rock, and those years of practice are evident on their debut album. The recordings contain the brash, raw vigor of the band’s live shows, forgoing sonic precision for visceral fervor, as if you’ve stumbled into a room where they happen to be playing. This approach mostly works, infusing the songs with an interesting sense of openness and the feeling that you don’t know what’s coming. “Beauty Meat,” a buoyant anthem, marries a soaring indie-pop melody with that edgy grit, and “Dress Like Mothers” extracts moments of beauty from layers of instrumental chaos. Occasionally, however, Sun Club can’t line up the pieces of the puzzle, like on disconnected rocker “Worm City,” as if they’re looking for something but aren’t sure what. The album has a disjointed, unworried aesthetic—hallmarks of the musicians’ youth—and that is inherently interesting, even if it’s not always clear what they’re after.