A Year of Music

Cold Sun’s Dark Shadows does not do what it says on the box. The band and album names suggest some kind of kohl-eyed coldwave from the late 80s, not an amalgam of the Grateful Dead, Pavement and Built to Spill, full of sinuous, meandering guitar lines and aggressively Aquarian lyrics drawn from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was apparently recorded in 1969 but not released until 1989, and even then on a tiny little label. It’s not precisely an overlooked gem, because it’s definitely a creature of its moment, with the stilted vocal delivery (which really does seem like an awkward hybrid of Jerry Garcia and Stephen Malkmus’s styles) and the somewhat overfamiliar psychedelic doodles draped all over the songs, but there’s something about its aggressive oddity and potentially laughable earnestness that got it deeply enough wedged in my head that I woke up this morning humming it.

And you can check it out for free, so if that sounds like your sort of thing, you should check it out.