Earlier this week, I found myself sifting through photos of the long-ago. The pictures ranged from the mid-1960s, both before and after my birth, through the ‘80s. What amazed me, and it happens every time I revisit preserved memories, is just how young everyone looks. The aged grandparents of my mind’s eye? Middle-aged. My parents? They’re not kids, yet—especially in the ‘60s shots—they sure look like they are. Then, this morning, I opened a time capsule of another sort, leading me to relive the highs (and, aside from Cracker, no lows) of the ‘90s, when the CD revolution crescendoed into a never-ending tsunami of cash for music companies and, too, a wealth of wonderful music. As happens every decade, in other words, a slew of artists and bands cranked it up like never before. Some borrowed from the old, others burrowed into the new, and even more merged the two. Grunge, of course, became the dominant musical style for a time, but alongside it were hook-laden reverberations from such groups as the Cranberries, Curve, Garbage, and the Sundays. Their songs sounded like dreams pressed to polycarbonate plastic, just about.
The same holds true of Sunday (1994), a retro-flavored “dream pop” trio that unreeled a string of moody singles and an EP in 2024. The six-song Devotion, released yesterday, has found me tripping through time; it plays like a series of lost treasures recovered from the 1990s’ version of the playlist, movie soundtracks. Lead singer Paige Turner’s pouty vocals float atop intricate melodies and arrangements that conjure scenes from the noir-infused cinematic gems that populated multiplexes that decade. The title track, which opens the set, is a good example: It could well kickstart a drama about an American expat falling for an uncouth English lad she meets in a London pub.
“Doomsday,” too, swirls from the cinema’s speakers about a quarter of the way through the film, when dreams of spending a lifetime with her beau balloon through her brain; it basically expounds upon the wedding vow of “‘til death do us part.” “Rain,” for its part, slows the mid-tempo arrangements a tad, with our protagonist promising the lad her heart despite his status as a youthful reoffender. “Still Blue” digs into the reasons why she’s decided to stick with him, which aren’t as romantic as she tells herself. “Picking Flowers” hones in on the mid-movie plot twist: “You told me in a parking lot/It’s over and now my heart/Is a shopping mall.” “Silver Ford” accelerates to the film’s end, with the protagonist back in the States and hoping against hope that her new love interest will take her further than the backseat.
All in all, the EP unreels at a mostly mid-tempo pace, blurring the between-song boundaries, with Lee Newell’s thick guitar cutting through the production gloss with aplomb. It’s a stirring, albeit too short, set that should appeal to any and all who remember the ‘90s.
The tracks:
The Old Grey Cat 