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Album Review: Armageddon in a Summer Dress by Sunny War

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A woman in a white dress walks along a shore, holding a pair of sneakers in one hand, as she approaches a group of flamingos and a black swan in the water.

Sunny War, born Sydney Lyndella Ward, defies genre in her latest album Armageddon in a Summer Dress. The mixture of genres, such as punk, folk, and pop, makes the album feel like a rich experience where you get to taste different things in one place. The Nashville singer-songwriter brings with her a five-piece band, but you don’t feel distracted by this. It’s like listening to one unified sound that is being done by one person. 

The album begins suddenly as if it steals your breath away. One Way Train, the first song, starts immediately with no introductory music to prepare you for the lyrics. You find yourself diving deep into the world that is Armageddon in a Summer Dress. Just like War defies genre, she also defies logic in the first song. Despite the heaviness of the lyrics, which explore the current status we find ourselves in where the world is filled with fascists and not enough money to survive, you find yourself swaying to the upbeat music. It feels like a club song in the best way possible. It feels like a defying song. Something you will shout as you march against everything wrong with our world. 

Again, War continues defying logic as the next song is the same when it comes to how the music contradicts the heaviness of the lyrics. Bad Times makes you stare at the fact that poverty is beginning to prevail. You face the truth of “I’ve got no money, so I’ve got no power.” And just like you might feel close to the song’s lyrics, you find yourself wanting to say loudly “Bad times, stay away.” How many times does one find themselves wishing for bad times to stay away? Probably a lot more than the ones said by War, but they’ll do. 

War finally takes some kind of mercy on you in Rise, which feels like a lullaby you wish someone would sing for you at the end of a bad day. But War’s pessimism, which is understandable in our times, still seeps into the song in a way when she sings “Bad days go and they come / But the good do too, my friend.” We still have to rise because what do we have left if we give up? The sun keeps rising, and War reminds you that you, too, can be like the sun. 

A different road appears in front of you as you listen to Ghosts. It’s a road filled with eerie music and longing for someone who is long gone. The song becomes more meaningful when you realize that War wrote it after having hallucinations in her late father’s 100-year-old house because of a gas leak, but the lyrics make you feel like she truly saw ghosts. The music and the electric guitar at the end carry you to the end of the song. For a minute, if you close your eyes, you can believe in ghosts too.

The highlight of the album, to me at least, is Walking Contradiction ft. Steve Ignorant of Crass. It is a lyrical masterclass where you can’t find anything to judge. War and Ignorant’s combined voices can start a revolution if you listen to the song for the right amount of time. It’s a reflection of everything wrong with America and how “the genocide” is funded by Americans’ taxes. I found myself holding my breath when I heard “Your humanity does not outweigh your will to survive” because of how true it is. Walking Contradiction is the kind of song you wish everyone knew about. Just like War and Ignorant’s voices are weaved together, so are the rest of the album’s songs. You can’t help but start making connections in hopes of following War’s vision or coming close to it. So when you hear in this song “We sell labor, we sell hours, sell our power, sell our souls,” you immediately think of  “I’ve got no money, so I’ve got no power” in Bad Times.

Walking Contradiction remains with you even as the next song, Cry Baby, starts. It couldn’t come at a better place. War sings about hope amidst pain, and you have pain inside of you after listening to Walking Contradiction. “But you did it once before / I know you’ll do it once more,” War says and you think that this can be adapted to everything the world is going through, including America. History books tell you that nothing lasts forever, and that pain ends one day, and so does War. 

In keeping with pain, No One Call Me Baby reminds us of how lonely we can feel. It perfectly captures the essence of loneliness, and you find yourself feeling some kind of loneliness even if you are surrounded by people. “No one calls me baby anymore / I hold my own hand,” War says, but you still feel like she is holding your hand and guiding you through the rest of the album. 

Scornful Heart ft. Tré Burt comes next and you feel its relation to the entire album. The voices fading away at the end are just like this album, both stay with you after the end. The echoes remain with you, just like you still feel War’s hand clasping yours.

The heaviness of the album keeps going on in Gone Again ft. John Doe which the album gets its title from. If No One Call Me Baby captures the essence of loneliness, then Gone Again captures the essence of regret. You can almost imagine an old lady regretting her marriage and having kids, and for a moment, you are reminded of your own regrets. 

“In your old age as you prepare for death
Regret will haunt you ’til there′s no you left
It′s bittersweet, but at least it’s the end
You catch your breath and then it′s gone again”

Till this point in the album, War managed to handle carefully different emotions such as loneliness and regret. She is weaving a tapestry where there are different colors, but they somehow create something very much complete. 

A portrait of a woman with curly hair styled in two puff balls, wearing a black button-up shirt, standing against a pink wall with some peeling paint.
Sunny War. Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins and retrieved from the New West Records website.

Lay Your Body has its own heavy themes to show off. The longing for someone is a universal feeling, and War seems to know it too well. She asks “Won’t you come back?” and you find yourself thinking of all the times you asked the exact same question. The music feels soft, like pleading with someone to come back, but you can’t show the extremism of your emotions so you don’t scare them away. In a way, I was pleading with War to never end Armageddon in a Summer Dress.

The final song, Debbie Downer, also has upbeat music, and it feels like the perfect end to this journey. 

“You’re a negative Nancy
A Debbie Downer
You’re perpetually antsy
An infinite frowner
This life’s too short
And you’re too crude
Please don’t distort
Hijack my mood”

“Please don’t distort / hijack my mood,” is the feeling you have left at the end of Armageddon in a Summer Dress. The ending of this song feels definite, like a goodbye to the album. In a way, Debbie Downer ends as suddenly as the album started. You remain holding your breath as all the feelings created by Armageddon in a Summer Dress remain with you.

Now, you have ghosts of your own.

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EP Album Review: Over The Earth, Under by Gailla

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If I had to say a single thing about Australian folk musician Gailla’s debut EP, Over The Earth, Under, it’s that it shows she has a clear understanding of what makes the genre special. With gorgeous musical arrangement, poignant and sweet lyrics, and a concept that ties everything together, Gailla’s introduction to the recording music scene is something to be paying attention to. The keyword here is ambition, as Gailla not only effectively gets her point across, in just over 17 minutes, but also lets us know she is an artist with much more to say.

Over The Earth, Under could simply be described as a protest EP, one centered around the current climate crisis, but Gailla and her band decided to take the concept even further. The first track of the project, midden, is a quick thirty-second invitation to the universe she is setting up, with nature sounds that eventually get overshadowed by  protesters chanting: “We will not stop, we will not rest.” This mirrors the final track of the EP, pippi, another interlude where nature sounds seem to be the focus, as the vague presence of people can hardly be heard. These two tracks alone already give the EP a conceptual feel, as the longer and lyrically focused songs are contextualized within them. In a way, with this structure, it almost seems as if Gailla is attempting to capture the essence of a real protest, with a clear focus, a striking beginning, and a somewhat fleeting conclusion.

Adding to this idea, the EP’s middle part also feels like the stream of consciousness someone would have in a real-life protest. We know the cause is just, we know that the fight is bigger than ourselves, but we can’t help but think of how this affects us, the people we love, loathe the people that brought it to be, have doubts, hopes, and more. Take, for example, the song Shape of Change, where Gailla sings about people whose “shape of change” necessitates that folks like her are poor, estranged, hurt, or even dead. Considering the context of the EP and the explicit mention of these people’s desire for other countries’ oil, we can easily imagine which power structures the song is aimed at.

I could go further with this concept, like with the songs 536 and Running on our own, both of which show Gailla embracing different feelings around the climate crisis, like doubt, collective strength, hope, etc. However, I would like to bring attention to the songs Run to and its partner Run to (the water), as these tracks show Gailla’s chops as a folk musician. On the first one, Gailla ponders where she’ll run to if the crisis reaches critical levels and, almost as importantly, if the person she loves would come along. With sharp writing, and a pinch of humor though overall a gloomy perspective, the song ends with unanswered questions about what this future would hold for them. In its partner song, Run to (the water), the nature imagery becomes vivid, as this running away with someone turns into a poetic and hypnotic metaphor about embracing nature. “We can just go anywhere she takes us/ Over the Earth, under dark blue mud”. Like the great folk musicians that came before her, Gailla amps her fight for nature by almost becoming one with it, making us connect more fiercely with every single one of her words.

In conclusion, Over The Earth, Under is a fantastic, short, and to-the-point, EP about the current climate crisis and the way it affects us. It shows that Gailla and her band deeply understand the genre and that they will use this talent and knowledge for a just cause moving forward.

As for us, we can only wait to see what she’ll do next.

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EP Album Review: I Ain’t So Blue by Emmy Ryan

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I Ain’t So Blue is Australian folk musician Emmy Ryan’s debut EP, and it’s an incredible showcase of her inner world, which is inevitably influenced by the world outside her. Comprised of seven songs and with a runtime just shy of thirty minutes, the EP is delightful, straightforward, topically relevant to the world at large, and, above all, honest. And it’s precisely this, Emmy’s honesty as a songwriter, that allows I Ain’t So Blue to feel like a unique display of talent and a promising sign for the music she will compose in the future.

As it is only fitting to start from the beginning, the EP opens with two tracks that effectively introduce us to Emmy’s sensibilities: Solo, So Low and A Place to Call Home. On the first song, we’re shown the meditative side of Emmy, as she is reminded of a past relationship, prompting her to reflect on the loneliness she is currently feeling. On the second one, she brings these meditative feelings to the world outside her mind, as the track is focused on the rise of interest rates on land, and how folks like her struggle to find a place to call home in the face of landlords’ monetary desires.

These two songs’ core elements can be found in many of the tracks on I Ain’t So Blue, as Emmy is capable of drawing us into her mind and the thoughts that inhabit it; but she can also get us to rally behind a just cause through the same process. The songs In My Dreams and How Many are great examples of this, as one is about navigating the insecurities around love and attraction, and the other is effectively a protest song that, thanks to the cover image used in the single version, we know is about the ongoing conflict in Palestine.

This is not to say that Emmy has a template when approaching music, rather, pointing this out shows how the fundamentals of the EP make it a cohesive and direct endeavor. Nowhere is this clearer than in the title track, I Ain’t So Blue, which is a fascinating song to choose to represent the project. The piece shows us a series of vignettes of Emmy’s world, intertwined with the chorus about how she’d tell the world she ain’t so lonely, that she ain’t so blue, but only if she’d convince herself that’s true. Considering that phrase is the first thing we see when opening the EP, there’s a sense that in the process of singing us these songs, with all the intimate feelings and worries attached to them, Emmy has in a way matured to tell us that, really, she ain’t so blue.

As for room for improvement, there is some space in the current folk music landscape that Emmy could use as inspiration for her next project. For starters, I Ain’t So Blue’s musical palette is perfectly suitable for the songs featured on it, but other folk musicians, take Mount Eerie as an example, have explored a diverse array of sounds that could also suit Emmy’s thematic ambitions in a more dynamic way. In terms of songwriting, Emmy’s intimate style could lean more into the vivid imagery already present in songs like Rainbow Trout, with artists such as Adrianne Lenker and Kara Jackson as possible guidance for this direction.

This is to say that Emmy’s future looks promising, as she is no doubt a talented and sensitive person who will continue to look inside and outside her world for inspiration. Hopefully, we get to hear more from her sooner rather than later.