The Answer Is In The Beat

Sun City Girls: Eye Mohini (Sun City Girls Singles Volume 3) (Abduction, 2013)

May 12, 2013 at 7:42 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

First off, why do we have almost nothing by Sun City Girls at WCBN? We have a huge chunk of the Sublime Frequencies catalog, and some Alvarius B, which is great, but barely anything by SCG, which is criminal. For a band as legendary, diverse, influential, prolific and weird as SCG, we should have the entire catalog. Anyway, this is the third CD volume of singles and rarities from the band. The full tracklist, track times and dates the songs were recorded and released are listed in the liner notes. Most of these songs were originally released on 7″ vinyl, so they tend to be short tracks. The tracks from the “Eye Mohini” 7″ from 1992 sound like they were mastered off of vinyl, with audible hiss and crackle. Everything here was originally released in the early ’90s, but as with a lot of their 7″ releases from that period, there’s a lot of tracks that were recorded way earlier, as far back as 1986. A lot of the collection focuses on brief Arabic-inspired surf-ish instrumentals, pseudo-Asian vocal styles (most of the lyrics aren’t in English), and mostly acoustic guitars, although there’s a few electric tracks here, such as the 30-second opener “Sun Damaged My Ass”, 2-minute freakout “It’s Ours”, and the devastating final track, a 10 minute live version of “Soar/The Flower”. Tracks 3, 7 and 11 are credited to “traditional folklore”, but it’s hard to tell whose. A couple other highlights are “Rose Room”, a minute-long country-ish instrumental, and “Esoterica Of Abyssynia”, which actually features both Bishop brothers playing electric guitars. An excellent collection of hard-to-find tracks from a visionary, much-missed band.