The most striking feature of Sunny War’s latest release, Armageddon in a Summer Dress, is that a five-piece band accompanies the singer. The folk punk artist has often played with others, but her singing and playing dominated the proceedings. She’s still front and center on the new record, but the silences that accompanied her vocals and made her seem edgy have been fleshed out. That’s a mixed blessing. Some songs enjoy a rock sheen that adds a progressive dimension to the material. However, War has always been better as an angry voice reminding one that life can suck. That can be masked here.
Sunny War directly addresses “Bad Times” on the new record and uses her band to provide an ironic counterpoint to the words. The biting lyrics note, “I’ve got no money so I’ve got no power / Back pain and rotting teeth / Gets written off as working class grief / So long basic health” as she protests the pain of poverty. Her voice is accompanied by carnivallike vibraphone arpeggios and harmony vocals sweetly choring “bad times stay away”. The songwriter deromanticizes her past suffering while simultaneously implying otherwise in the music.
This kind of incongruity characterizes the singer. After all, her chosen name (she was born Sydney Lyndella Ward) and the album’s title reflects these types of purposeful inconsistencies. There’s nothing cheerful about combat and nothing apocalyptic about wearing warm weather attire. The Nashville singer-songwriter does much more than combine opposites to undermine their connections. She creatively challenges conventional norms in musical and lyrical terms. She’s a punk rocker who now lives in the country music capital and writes personal folk-based protest songs about our mutual situation. She is also an atheistic anarchist with gospel music roots. This combination of diverse influences and ideologies makes her unique.
Sunny War is also joined by several other talented singers, including Steve Ignorant, Valerie June, Tré Burt, and John Doe. Her duet with Ignorant on “Walking Contradiction” provides the album’s highlight as the two preach the secular sermon about the evils of capitalism and personal capitulation. They sharply deliver their radical statements (“And they pacify you with the right to march and right to speak / Cos they know that you rely on them for everything you eat / And you’ll never truly break away or ever leave their side”) that skewers liberals and lefties as much as right-wing conservatives.
Doe and War both take turns and harmonize on “Gone Again”, the song from which the LP gets its title. The track tells of a woman who leads a conventional life. She suffers the existential pain of not being true to herself. She leads the lie of life with a husband she doesn’t love and kids that keep her from fulfilling her needs. She may explode, or not, at any time. The track’s name refers to how distant she is from the person she once was or had the potential to be.
There are some more hopeful cuts on the album, such as “Rise”, that notes “bad days come and go”—and so do good ones. However, most of the songs, with names such as ‘Cry Baby”, “No One Calls Me Baby”, “Scornful Heart”, and are sad. That makes the final cut “Debbie Downer” particularly strange. The singer castigates a friend as a “Negative Nancy / A Debbie Downer / You’re perpetually antsy / An infinite frowned.” That could be herself she’s singing about, and maybe she is.