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I feel like there are two sides of me, says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced. Thats the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out. Everybody is a beast just trying their hardest to be good. Thats what it is to be human. Youre not really good or bad. Youre just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and youre probably doing a shitty job of it. Thats okay, because were all just monsters. Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though shes marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments (like the collage of voices that closes Shelter and Storm). She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song. Its a style shes been honing for most of her life, at least since she took her first guitar lessons and fell in love with music. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with AC/DC, and I loved dramatic 80s guitar bands like Motley Cre. Later, I was obsessed with Bad Brains, the Minutemen, and X. True to the punk ethos, her first punk band, the Anus Kings, made music with whatever they had at hand, and what they had at hand were acoustic guitars. That made them stand out among other Los Angeles groups at the time, and today Sunny is the rare roots artist who covers Ween and can drop a Crass reference into a song (as she does on Whole). I dont really make music with a traditional roots audience in mind. I like weird music, outsider music, like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson.
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