Sunrot - Passages

With a name like Sunrot you’d be right in guessing this might be a feel bad hit of the winter. As their name suggests, Sunrot are not at the breezier end of the rock spectrum. They offer caustic sludge / noise core parsed with unsettling ambience sections. At times, its like The Abominable Iron Sloth jamming with Isis in a dank basement studio with some kind of obscure Neurosis side-project playing somewhere distantly in a dilapidated urban sprawl.

When they crank it out, Sunrot are punishingly heavy with a pervasive bleakness and density. The First Wound has a sludgy, almost stoner blues rumble, with crests of nasty dissonance and reverb while the blood coughing wailing screams screech ferally. It is a lumbering, muddy colossal piece of unfriendliness with a slightly hallucinogenic edge. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the grubby setting for this record.

Sleep, however, is two minutes of darkly cerebral and hypnotic ambient drone not too dissimilar to Tribes of Neurot with repetitive clunks, whistling reverb and druidic chants. Indeed, the monstrous shadow of Neurosis (if not in volume, but in mood) looms inscrutably in the background throughout some of this EP . Untethered has a trippy, undulating primal beat and aside from crashing rises in visceral volume, it has a vaguely zoned out Pelican-listening-to-grunge vibe. A final curve ball is the closer, Ra, a smoked out passage of fuzzy, disconcerting ambience with an indistinct spoken word recording from the late eccentric jazz experimentalist and artist Sun Ra. It imperceptibly alters the oppressive and unsettling mood of the EP.

This record is something of a curiosity and is not simply an exercise in savagery. Sunrot instead address wrath in a cerebral, meditative space. It feels like this could be a mezzanine release for this band, who could re-direct in a number of stylistic options. The epiphanic closing song in particular hints at resolution and just maybe that the sun isn’t that rotten after all.

*Passages is released via Prosthetic Records