Music

new music: stream the full length debut from afropunk 2013 botb winners sunny gang #soundcheck

April 18, 2016

Somewhere over the past 3 years, lovable party-crashers Sunny Gang have transformed from the kind of guys who live in a PBR-carpeted house known semi-ironically as the Bong Water Lagoon (after the inexplicable puddle that collects in the basement even when it isn’t raining) but they throw the best fucking parties (as long as you wear a HAZ-MAT suit to the bathroom), to those same guys, living in the same house; half-embarassed, half-nostalgic about the name, who host a Kwame Nkrumah book club on Thursdays, and still throw the best fucking parties on Fridays (as long as you wear a HAZ-MAT suit to the bathroom). Like the similar march that’s claimed the minds of some of the best punks of my generation from Anarchist to Libertarian to Republican, Sunny Gang’s Party/Animal marks their pupation from nothing-matters-let-it-burn nihilism to modern-society-is-a-cancer-of-oppression-and-hypocrisy-let-it-burn anarchism.

By Nathan Leigh, AFROPUNK contributor

Divided into two halves, the Party and the Animal, Sunny Gang indulges in the two extremes of their interests: getting wasted and leaving a wake of destruction behind them, and getting informed about systemic injustice and leaving a wake of knowledge behind them. It’s messy. It’s contradictory. It’s probably best not to think too hard about the contradictions because the party itself is pretty damn glorious. “Soap Scum” kicks off the album. It’s an ode to drunken-boasting and treading the line between the life of the party and that guy all your friends are sort of embarrassed to be around. “Pit Maneuvers” cribs a riff from “Rock Lobster” (fuck you if you have a problem with that) delivering what might be the album’s most fun blast of nihilistic wrath.

Before the record kicks into the Animal section, there’s an instrumental called “Kafka.” Why is there an instrumental called “Kafka?” Fuck you that’s why. The Animal half showcases an obsession with history. Frontman “Nasty” Nate Hitchcock charts the continuum of system oppression with the rage of a caged lion (your rat in a cage is adorable, Billy Corgan). Previous singles “Godzilla” and “Burn It Down” track the history of class struggle, first from the point of view of the oppressor, then the front-line revolutionaries, before “Animal” puts the focus squarely on the growing frustration of the average person, as they realize they traded liberty for security. Hitchcock grows from “you can’t cage me / I’m a motherfucking animal” to joining the struggle and declaring “everything’s fucked!”

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