Album Review: Sundrifter - "An Earlier Time"

It’s probably too much of a cheap cop-out if I just say that Sundrifter’s “An Earlier Time” is everything that worked on their previous full-length “Visitations,” but better, right?  That would be lazy?  Fine, let’s dig in.

Lazy or no, that’s the truth of it.  “Visitations” was a record steeped in stoner rock lore, modified with a space-y theme and packaged and shipped with chunky riffs and wandering vocal cadences and it was every part of beautiful and smoothy accomplished in its goal of creating a space where the listener could close their eyes and be carried away on a cosmic tide of distortion.

Okay, that was a run-on sentence, but that works, because “Visitations” was, for its achievement and greatness, essentially a run-on sentence, loaded to the limit with droning intonations and the meanderings of unquiet but uniquely focused minds.  Which is to say, uniquely focused on the central tonality of the album at hand.

“An Earlier Time” is, by contrast, a less focused effort, and much better for the experience.  As rudimentary as it sounds to suggest, this album improves on what made the last album work by focusing on creating songs, and not necessarily just on pieces of music that allow the brain to disconnect and float away.

Let me rein in here, I’m not making any sense.  Go back to “Death March,” and now compare it to this new album’s “Space Exploration.”  The layman might not be able to discern the difference easily, but notice that the latter song has a more focused vocal performance, and that the song moves through stages while still maintaining the baseline theme of far-out space rock.  There’s a chorus and a verse and a bridge and all the transitions that make for superior songcraft.

That’s really the whole of the experience with “An Earlier Time.”  This is Sundrifter using more tools of the trade to make a brighter, more nimble experience that’s easier to digest in bite-sized pieces while still staying true to the roots of the band’s ideal self.  The development of songwriting on this record heightens everything that it contains, moving Sundrifter from being a novel, catchy experience to being a force within their chosen splinter genre.

Which is not to say that the album completely abandons how we got here.  “Begin Again” might be the best song on the record, and is also the longest.  The positively spritely guitar into eventually gives way to the kind of minimalist droning that so exemplifies Sundrifter through three albums now.  But it never gets lost within itself, never gives away completely to the reckless abandon of repetition.

We should also take a moment to recognize “Want You Home,” an airy space ballad that lives on the border of some of the more esoteric songs by Cream, which is meant as a compliment.  This kind of song has to have all the pieces fit just right to not become hackneyed, and the choral backing and major chord choruses provide the glue for what is as unique a song as any Sundrifter has produced to this point, or can be found in the genre.

“An Earlier Time” is a more mature and focused album by Sundrifter, a band who had already given us glimpses of their potential in years gone by.  There are certainly still some sequences that get a little long in the tooth, but if you weren’t expecting that in this style of music, you may be misguided in the first place.  Despite the name of the album, “An Earlier Time” is a revelatory step in space rock.