You've got your throwback acts-- content to fix a backwards gaze, work on their period-appropriate outfits, and match new words to old riffs-- and then there's San Francisco's Sonny & the Sunsets. They cull their sound from time-honored sources on their debut, Tomorrow is Alright, yet they're a wonderful anomaly-- never feeling tied to any particular era, overly beholden to their source material, or like they chose reverence for lack of better ideas. You can throw out influences all day-- Everly Brothers, glammy garage, doo-wop-- but you'll never quite cover it, and this slipperiness is key to their success. Tomorrow Is Alright matches 10 of Sonny Smith's wry, easygoing tunes with a far-reaching pastiche of vintage trappings, never feeling dutifully retro but rather, like their tough-to-pin-down citymates Girls, intangibly classic.
Smith's been kicking around San Francisco for a minute now as both a playwrite and songsmith. The former's written all over Tomorrow's best tunes, which paint slightly askew, slyly funny portraits of wayward spacemen and the women who enslave them, randy youngsters, and Mary Kay test subjects. Throughout the record, Smith himself seems to be playing this unflappable bemused observer character. Smith's bent sense of humor and his sweet, scraggly pipes further sets them apart from their obvious sonic forebears. In no particular hurry to get to his point, Smith comes off as a likeable dude, and that easy charm helps put even the more directly descended songs over. No matter how you dressed these tunes up, they'd still feel cool, confident, and at times, wickedly funny.
The Sunsets, featuring members of Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, and Citay, plus Sub Pop's Kelley Stoltz largely stay in the background, providing sparse but carefully considered instrumentation. Citay's Tahlia Harbour is the lone exception, although even she's used sparingly; her deadpan counterpoints to Sonny's stoney spaceman in "Planet of Women" or rationale-spouting youngster in "Lovin' on an Older Gal" are impeccably timed, a fitting gee-whiz to Sonny's endless aw-shucks. The production's crisp and roomy, allowing each word to linger, each note its own space.
Tomorrow Is Alright feels like the work of a songwriter comfortable with himself and his limitations. Smith doesn't have a knockout voice; he's a natural, unflashy guitarist; and his lyrics skew conversational rather than confessional. Rather than outpacing himself with wild ambitions, Tomorrow Is Alright picks a lane and sticks with it, yet it feels far less reductive than most retro rock due to his easy charm. The couple-three tunes towards the back of Tomorrow that lean just a tad more heavily on older tropes don't leave quite the same mark as the very distinctive early highlights "Planet" or "Too Young to Burn" or "Death Cream", but even those throw an earworm or sweet harmony your way. So many bands put in a lot of work trying to make themselves sound older than their years; with their quiet confidence and no shortage of killer material, the Sunsets make it seem almost too easy.
