Sunburned Hand Of The Man Pick A Day To Die LP

Pick A Day to Die is the first proper studio album from Sunburned Hand of the Man in 10 years (A, Ecstatic Peace!). You would be forgiven if you had forgotten in the interim but while Sunburned is fully committed to vast, ritualistic summonings, they were perhaps uniquely capable of channeling that cosmic funk.

There's a throb and a groove to the music that made it as much body music as head music. This is "free your ass" weirdness that chugs and bounces. It makes us want to get out of our heads where we've all been trapped these past months and drive on the freeway or bop down the street. Pick A Die to Die. Sure, but definitely not today. The album marks a resurfacing of one of the great under-heralded psych outfits to roam over the past two plus decades. Join in the cult of Sunburned.

One of the finest independent labels in all the land, Three Lobed Records, is celebrating 20 years of providing the world with various strains of psychedelic music with a perfectly ambitious series of releases that includes material from Sonic Youth, guitarist Daniel Bachman, Six Organs of Admittance and this wooly wonder from the amorphous New England ensemble Sunburned Hand of the Man. Constructed from sessions recorded over the course of a decade, the album is as dark and slippery as a handful of mercury - the music briefly taking the shape of hollowed out rock or concussed disco or scratchy kosmische pop before tumbling into a formless puddle again. When you have absorbed and played as many different modes of music as the various members of Sunburned have in their lives, what sense would it make to stick to one genre? And why wouldn't they fuck around with the DNA of each style they try on? And why wouldn't you join in the fun? All you have to do is drop the needle and let go.