I don't do "quirky". I didn't/don't get Vampire Weekend, Local Natives, Future Islands, or Mike Patton vocals. And I never will. It’s so self conscious artiness...so specious, so much bullshit. And any band that claims Tom Waits as an influence qualifies as pompous, if not pretentious. Yes, there seems to be some confusion regarding the definition of "pretentious": it could be defined as artifice, or it could be defined as assuming that which is not, and yes, I did that on purpose (see: That Which Is Not, Public Image Limited, 1995). Personally, if it sounds like a f*#@d up duck, and it looks like a f*#@d up duck, it’s a f%#@g f@#*d up duck, motherf$#@*.
    Which brings us back to Animal Collective. I don’t subscribe to all these hosannas. I do, however, buy into the Panda Bear hype. The latest release from the Sonic Boom/Noah Lenox collective, which was reviewed here many months ago, as in "you read it here first", was the last word in Smile era Brian Wilson experimentation. Yes, it was that good.
    Is this band the next Collective? No, they are better than that.
    They are the next Panda Bear.
    Controversial doesn't even cover Wilson's advance from Smile to Smiley Smile. If he'd produced something in the interim of that breakdown, it would sound like Baltimore's Sun Club on their second album, the unfortunately, and sillily titled Dongo Durango. Well, to that I say what f#@^*g ever. Sometimes we must indulge silliness. Which I do, daily, as I navigate Sun Club and their Facebook/Twitter post, which are...inscrutable...well. It was recorded in Pigtown, which is second only to, well, none as far as strange neighborhoods go in Charm(less)City.
    I kid. Mount Vernon is the middle of the city, and certainly the city's cultural center as it's the premiere bona (drag) gay neighborhood, and the only place to partay other than the overpriced tourista Harbourplace and the hipster Fells Point/Canton rich white ghetto.
    Back up. You said Mount Vernon? Home of my beloved Lowe Dens, who had space in the upper echelons of this space many months ago...must I remind one and all to click pon the features option?
    Sun Club have nothing to do with the gothic Lower Dens.
    (Who is the better band? Neither, it was nineties bands The Reprobates, from Balt/DC, Johnny Love And Speed, from Pigtown, and pieman Rodney Henrey's Glenmont Popes, that ruled that decade... But I show my age, and my bias).
    Neigh! Sun Club is the second best band in Baltimore, behind Lower Dens.
    So what does all that silliness sound like?
    Ebullient psychedelic pop. Percussive afropop.
    If one was trapped in a cavernous, empty hall, where cheerleading, acid deranged musos were presided over by Brian and Phil in an alternative Seinfeldian alterniverse, with quasi martial sticksonrim percussion, with bipolar, hypermanic soul (yeah, I know, another Al Jourgensen reference)...and influenced by sublime entropy...
    I can help you suh!
    Sun Club appear at 9:30 Club @ 2100 (I think) Monday nite.