Album Review: Sundara Karma – Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect


Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect



Image can deceive; a gander at Sundara Karma’s leather coats, eye-liner and reams of hair and you’d expect their sound to slobber down on us from the coarse acropolis of old-time rock and roll.

While you’re busy squinting up there, in reality the Reading four-piece are at ground level, yakking in a musical language more fluent in millennial indie-pop than anything else. And for large portions of their debut album, Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect, it translates well.

On opener A Young Understanding singer Oscar Lulu (as flamboyant a frontman pseudonym if ever there was one) pelts his words over kinetic bass lines until a falsetto chorus snaps the moody, posturing spell. The song barely settles before Loveblood kicks off at a heady speed, lulling any laymen in earshot into thinking Arcade Fire have made an all conquering comeback. The Canadians’ touch is felt again on the following Olympia, this time torqued with wistful Americana.

If the music sports its inspirations boldly, sometimes too boldly, that’s not to say that the music is uninspired. Happy Family feels epic. Part hymnal, part soul-searching, big emotions are up for sale and bought with every listen. Lulu is adamant that he and his towering vocals are staying in the night on The Night. It’s tempting to stay there with him.

The good-time track of the record, She Said, is a guitar-laden, chug-a-lugging knockout about the uncertainties of being young. Instinctive feeling isn’t everything for the group though, and they try to rub the intellect more than a lot of the indies around today; Lulu’s been open about his love of Shakespeare (Loveblood is inspired by Romeo and Juliet) and you’d be hard stretched to find a palatable tune you can dance to that’s been influenced by incessant thinker, Plato. Flame fills that spec to a tee.

Fans of the band might feel like they’ve pulled short straws considering over half of the 12 tracks offered have been released in single or EP form since the band first appeared in 2014. The element of surprise has been strangled out of it to say the least. Of the handful of unheard numbers, Be Nobody‘s slow thrust leaves only minor impact and Watching From Great Heights clangs of Kings Of Leon without moving far enough away from them. They end up hitting their stride with the stiff acoustic strums of Lose The Feeling, a guttural tale of valleys, wizened women and enlightenment.

For a such a young band (they’re all around 20) to be rosily looking back on life before they’ve had much of it themselves seems prima facie superficial. But with the astute line, “We all lust for/We all need/Another hit from the giving screen,” on Deep Relief, they’re tapping into our device-obsessed culture and seeing it for the void that it is, which takes maturity.

Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect is the noise of them wriggling the shackles of their youthhood off. Adulthood can only carry on getting better.

(Steven White)


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