Boston-based collective
Sunburned Hand of the Man burned brightly throughout the 2000s, their lineup shifting with almost each new release as they zigzagged between everything from free jazz skronk to warped takes on old-timey folk. The group reached a dizzying peak in output and productivity around 2008, releasing scads of limited-CD-R albums as well as more fully realized documents of their ever-shifting group perspectives. This slowed down considerably after the release of 2010's
Four Tet-produced venture A. Though the band never truly deactivated, the time between releases got longer and longer. A 2019 album, Headless, signaled a return of
SHotM's freaked-out powers, and
Pick a Day to Die stands with the best of their work from their most active years. The album's seven tracks come from an archive of unreleased material recorded between 2007 and 2017, edited and reassembled into one flowing, if erratic statement. After the soft, tentative acoustic guitar and understated electronics of eerie folk opener "Dropped a Rock," the droning title track goes in a completely different direction, with driving Motorik drums and vocalist Shannon Ketch spitting out absurdist spoken lyrics somewhere between
Lee Ranaldo and
Captain Beefheart. "Initials" starts out in a spacy disco groove but grows more and more frenzied as manipulated vocals creep into the mix, joining the electro-acoustic instrumentation with a storm of shattered syllables. When this confusing maelstrom dies down, "Prix Fixe" offers a different kind of intensity, starting out as a screamy punk song and then melting down into a cosmic jam when legendary
Dinosaur Jr. guitarist
J. Mascis steps in to solo over the song's second half. Like much of the album, it's a weird mesh of styles that shouldn't work, but somehow does. Almost every track is made up of wildly different instrumentation and sounds than the one before it, but somehow all of
Sunburned Hand of the Man's wild tangents congeal into a singular energy. Even at its most bizarre and feral,
Pick a Day to Die conveys a sense of positivity and excitement as the collective remains in the constant state of rediscovering themselves that they've made their life's work. ~ Fred Thomas