Sun City Girls - Torch Of The Mystics (Album Review)

 

Sun City Girls - Torch Of The Mystics

(1990)

My copy: 2015 remastered reissue by Abduction.

Though it is probably their most famous album, the Sun City Girls had already spent most of the 80s releasing tapes and LPs full of bizarre experimental music prior to the release of Torch Of The Mystics in 1990. Torch Of The Mystics took their knack for strange and guttural vocal chants and combined it with an absolutely freakish brand of rock music. 

Sun City Girls ease into the album with “Blue Mamba” which is almost happy sounding in its bright, catchy guitar riffs. There are quiet vocal moans and growling basslines, and eventually dissonance is mixed in with the eastern scales. A bombardment of noisy, rattling tremolo absorbs the main guitar riff and drums like a tornado before fully dropping us into the alien carnival act of “Tarmac 23.” The Sun City Girls craft some songs as if they were electric adaptations of freak-folk, humming and groaning in made-up languages while industrial guitars drone underneath. “Esoterica In Abyssynia” then  satirizes arena rock with powerful, energetic riffs albeit with strange lo-fi production that give each track a sense of mystique. The songs on this album sound like rock music being processed and replicated by either aliens or some primal, uncontacted tribe.

“Space Prophet Dogon” rises with dense tremolo before spilling over into a slower paced, spiritual take on psychedelics. The vocals cry out with impressive conviction, despite their delivery of made-up words. The band then covers the Bolivian song “Llorando Se Fue” in “The Shining Path” which allows them to keep listeners in a foreign atmosphere in spite of poppy, up-beat melodies. “The Flower” is an impressive experiment in which drowsy harmonies linger into crazed ritualistic noise-making, all while layers of vocalizations carry the core structure of the song forward; this track in particular combines the satisfaction of harmony with the horror of cacophonous noise-making, like a beautiful mess. 

The mysterious melodic tones of “Cafe Batik” take the album in a totally different direction, including dramatic falsetto crooning. There are times where the pretension is certainly palpable, but the mission of the Sun City Girls is clearly not to pass themselves off as ultra self serious artists; these are creative souls who express themselves in strange ways in order to either fulfill themselves or to simply have fun. Thus it is often easy to get past some of the borderline obnoxious moments, as there is something intentionally humorous or childlike about what is happening in the music. 

“Radar 1941” then curves back around to pop with sunny melodies, slide guitars and a surf-rock atmosphere. More vocal chanting and primal mouth sounds appear in “Papa Legba” before the bone-rattling campfire instrumental of “The Vinegar Stroke.” “Burial In The Sky” closes the album with an impressive wall of droning vocals, field recordings of insects and cars, and animalistic whining. 

Torch Of The Mystics is a totally off-kilter and underrated addition to the canon of rock-music, if you could even really classify this record under any one genre. There are times where the eccentricity can get the best of even more seasoned music fans, but there is inherent value in the use of harmony and layering. The production is just weird and obscured enough to immerse listeners in some other world. 

It is far from a perfect listen, but Torch Of The Mystics was assuredly created by masters of aesthetics.