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2008 was a marathon year for Bill Baird and Sunset: Pink Clouds, Bright Blue Dream, and The Glowing City. These three full-length albums, each distinct iterations of Sunset’s characteristic sound, accounted for hours upon hours of music that no doubt took many more hours still to write and record. After a year of formalizing his band and establishing his new east side studio, Baby Blue, 2010 brings yet another new release in the Sunset catalog, Gold Dissolves To Gray. Tempting as it is to throw it up on the shelf with the earlier releases, much of the album serves as a re-imagining of Sunset’s sound as stripped down, comical at times, and all-together a more coherent album.
Opener “Change Comes Slow” doesn’t quite hint at the real changes the album brings to the table. The familiar high-pitched picked guitar flutters over the usual drum corps of hard beats driving the short intro; nothing new yet. The dreamy “Sunshine Hair,” though, is subtle not just musically, but also strangely in its simplicity. Still resoundingly “Sunset” in its instrumentation and Baird’s omnipresent vocals wrapped softly around the music, the song, and many that follow, seem content and confident in their direction as opposed to the sonic expeditions of Bright Blue Dream, or the flowing multi-song anthems of The Glowing City.
The tracks that follow reveal more paired-down creations that become increasingly sarcastic and cynical about the world, in a odd chocolate-factory way that only Baird could dream up. Stumbling upon “Garden of Eden,” we’re thrown into a carnival of clarinet and tin-pan piano with our comical bandleader Baird imparting the history of creationist-meets-evolutionary humanity in perfect deadpan. “So what now?” he asks, “Well, we’re here and… that’s that. As for me I’d like to be an ape again / but I’m allergic to steak / and my beard’s too thin.” Later on, the twangy back-porch “Civil War,” which imagines a raging war between the body parts, tangles inner strife with comically simple jokes: “My heart versus my brain, oh I fight like Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens must have fought before.”
The trimming down of the rough edges reveals a comical side of Baird that had long been buried underneath the clap of run-away drum beats and their musical wake. As much as the structure of Sunset songs influences their meaning, the simplicity throughout the album is the perfect compliment to the humor: Baird doesn’t sweeten up his views of the world with cocky punch lines or the off-handed obscenity, nor does he smear them into ambiguous philosophical rants; instead we get bits of truth paired with music as easily as they are with seemingly-wholesome metaphors, all simplified to comically childish levels of simplicity. And your soft chuckles (along with Baird’s) are either carried away with a clarinet solo, or diced to pieces by a clamoring snare drum.
Not that the album isn’t without its slower songs such as the mostly instrumental “Hill Country Smog” and “Green Truck,” which, while acting as decent segues, have difficulty holding up on their own. That said, Gold Dissolves To Gray, stands apart from their previous string of releases as an album that inches closer to being not just another Sunset album in a fresh coat of paint and sprinkling of glitter, but a Sunset album that speaks with a voice of its own, a distinct and insular set of songs that congeal around a common, irreplaceable theme.
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