Hype can be a useful, but also very dangerous thing for a young new band. It can stroke egos, build complacency and produce disappointment if their releases don’t live up to all the hyperbole. Luckily Sunflower Bean have navigated all the craziness with astounding focus and maturity for their young age. They’ve worked hard, toured relentlessly and taken the whole 'being in a band' business very serious indeed. The result is a début that might feels confident in its own craft, but not about very much else going on in the world.

Tame Impala have always been a continuous reference point, something the band themselves have done nothing to diminish, after all, an early single was even titled ‘Tame Impala’. The melodic psych-rock of Kevin Parker is still in there, especially in the single ‘Wall Watcher’, which is constructed from a solid riff and swirling flange effect. But generally these are the record's most straightforward moments, and they’ve expanded their sound to occupy a more ambivalent space.

Human Ceremony is an album characterised by the uncertainty of youth and trying to find your identity. Many of these songs are in a dialogue with themselves and each other and this back and forth is mirrored in the interplay of bassist Julia Cumming and guitarist Nick Kivlen’s vocals. ‘I Was Home’, the most propulsive song on the album up to that point, despite the fact it's about long periods of being totally immobile, is an example of this. “What did you do today?” Kivlen asks and Cummings sheepishly replies “Didn’t do much today”. But then idleness becomes an opportunity of self-reflection: “I had a dream I saw myself on TV / and I viewed myself many different ways”. The album as a whole is doing the same thing, weighing up different perspectives but never really coming to a conclusion. That doesn’t matter though, the journey of questioning is more important than arriving at an answer. On the opening title track they even pull a bit of a Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood. Cummings is the light, intangible presence while Kivlen’s contrasting unsubtle baritone feels grounded. The song operates less as a verse/chorus and more as a capricious backwards and forwards between these two tones and atmospheres. “I want you to stay here / I feel so much better on my own” Cummings muses on ‘Human Ceremony’ but she sees no problem in this obvious confliction. As the transcendentalist poet Walt Whitman observed: “I am large / I contain multitudes”. Human nature itself is contradictory.

‘Easier Said’ is a deceptively simple bit of dream pop that has a hidden bite under all the shimmering guitars. “Don’t be afraid to see it through” mimics Julia as someone advising her, but she’s quick to retort. “Easier said than done / I heard you right the first”. As if reality was really ever that simple.

‘Creation Myth’ seems to be a retelling of the biblical version of the birth of everything, but Sunflower Bean's is considerably less eventful, “On the first day it was good / On the second day it was good…” and so on, until there’s an abrupt pause before a monstrous fuzzed up riff erupts. The storm quickly clears however, and we return to the clear skies of the song's first half. Is this a sonic interpretation of everything coming into existence in one elemental cacophony? Religious imagery comes up yet again on ‘I Just Don’t Know’ with Julia reassuring herself that “Jesus has a place for me” but yet again it seems more like a dismissal of such easy solutions.

When you're nineteen years old ‘2013’ probably feels like an aeon ago and on the track name after the year, Sunflower Bean make it sound like a distant dystopian future. Its an obvious send up to the 60’s one-hit-wonder ‘In the Year 2525’ by Zager and Evans which documents a pessimistic prediction of humanity's future. The reference rears its head in the album closer ‘Space Exploration Disaster’ mixed in with a bit of ‘Space Oddity’ for good measure. We’re now in the (at the time the song was written) present: “In the year 2015 / No one can hear you scream” but it also describes drifting away from the planet, and perhaps gaining a broader perspective and seeing the relative irrelevancy of all the grievances happening on this small blue dot.

 At times the album wears its influences a little too prominently on its sleeves, and the seams where all these sounds have been stitched together are a bit too visible. But that’s to be expected from such a young band, and it’s imbued with the energy of newfound discoveries. The various shifts in mood and genre capture something of what it is to discover that the world is malleable, and nothing is fixed, least of all yourself.
Louis Ormesher

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