Sunday Driver: A Letter to Bryson City

It’s really quite amazing, the way that Doghouse Records has become a true powerhouse of the indie rock community. Their explosion started several years ago, with the release of The Get Up Kids’ Four Minute Mile and Hot Water Music’s Forever and Counting. Since that time, they’ve managed to release some pretty solid records, including that enormous All American Rejects record. Enter the next big record for Dirk Hemsath and his Doghouse cronies: Sunday Driver‘s A Letter to Bryson City.

Sunday Driver is made up of guys from Florida, and this represents their first full album of material. For a debut, this is an incredibly well written and performed album. Sunday Driver seems to take equal cues from former Doghouse stars Chamberlain, Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, and Juliana Theory. The song structures on A Letter to Bryson City are put together in a way that produces maximum grandiosity through the use of huge walls of guitar and pummeling drums. The band can rock when it wants, yet it can also mellow out with a bit of country swagger (add Chamberlain comparison here), especially on the verse of the album’s strongest track, “Faking”.

Let me just say that Shudder to Think fans have been in limbo since 50,000 B.C., but “Faking” is so completely Shudder to Think, it should do to tide them over. The chorus sounds especially like later Shudder to Think, with breathy, very Craig Wedren-esque vocals, and guitar note bends atop a heavily distorted rhythm guitar. This is a tremendous song, and it rocked me with unbridled fury. I knew that once I heard this track that, at the very least, emo kids will totally eat this record up. As I said, this song is incredible, but it may be a bit too raw for mainstream radio.

As with most bands of the “emo” genre, for the most part, their music is either too complicated, too angular, or too aggressive for a mainstream listening audience; that’s what makes Jimmy Eat World’s recent success all the more noteworthy. I kind of think that there’s this kind of unwritten law that a band needs to be “gritty” or “raw” when they record for “emo-punk” labels, like Doghouse; The Get Up Kids have completely abandoned the intensity that made Four Minute Mile loved by so many. So, Sunday Driver’s debut has guitars the size of China and extremely hard hitting drums that really give a beating to the listener’s eardrums. It’s really awesome to hear a band that plays melodic emo stuff not wussing out right away, but the way these guys play, it seems that they could be doing these songs on grand pianos and they’d still be good; much of this has to do with lead singer, Alex Martinez’s magical voice.

This guy has it all. He can be breathy and whiney, but he’s got a naturally warm and deep tone to his voice that keeps things from getting annoying. At times, he resembles Geoff Farina of Karate; at other times, he’s Craig Wedren. Regardless of what established singers he sounds like, his voice is so unique that, if this record blows up like it might, I could see his voice being used as a reference point.

Getting back to the songs themselves, when I listen to them, I kind of get that wary feeling about them, like I know that they’re incredible, pretty much from start to finish, and I want to do them justice with my feeble words. “Things She Left Behind” is absolutely wonderful, opening with a warm, overdriven bass tone, with a tricky little drum beat underneath it, while a lightly strummed guitar wanders around, with another playing single notes above the whole scene. The chorus makes me get goose bumps! There’s this weird guitar thing going on in the background, involving a chorus pedal (makes the guitar sounds like many guitars are playing simultaneously). “You know she’s not coming / You’re waiting for nothing / You know she’s not coming back”, shouts Martinez over the aforementioned guitar line and an incredibly propulsive drum beat. Awesome!

The next song of extraordinary merit is the tribal and triumphant “Borrowed Shoes” that features a drum beat similar to Sara Lund of Unwound’s signature swaying beats. Again, the chorus is incredibly sing-able, even to the most novice of fans. I don’t even know the words, and I wish that this promo came with the lyrics, but I can always pretend: “I’m walking behind you, stepping on your heels / Wondering how it feels, to occupy those shoes”. Clever little line.

Wrapping this up, this is the kind of record that I loved after just the first listen. It owned the CD player in my car all day yesterday and today, and I don’t see it being dethroned for a while. Shudder to Think fans, this is the fix that you’ve been waiting for. The same can be said for Chamberlain fans. I used to think no one ever heard bands on Doghouse, other than Metroschifter, but then Four Minute Mile came along. If this debut by Sunday Driver makes it into the right hands, we could be looking at Doghouse’s next big unit shifter. This is an incredible album.