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Gird your loins folks, the latest album from Sun Blood Stories is out today April 21st anno domini 2017. Recorded by the band in a Boise basement, It Runs Around the Room with Us begins with a soft, melancholic ballad that nebulously floats above a heavy fog of ambient droning noise. It explores the ineffable feeling of depressive loss in the early hours of evening and, according to vocalist Amber Pollard, describes the feeling of arriving at a destination only to realize it wasn’t quite what you hoped it might be. Sun Blood Stories succeeds in materializing this vision that is effectively continued into “Step Softly Ghost” which has the sultry plod and harmonic timbre of an early Grizzly Bear album before solidifying into a high gain guitar chunk slugfest.

In “Great Destroyer,” the band describes the obliterating nature of time that, like its primordial titan Kronos, consumes its young–no sooner giving life than initiating the process of decay. Vocalist Ben Kirby sings in a detached, deadpan drawl, “great destroyer, roll on” highlighting the simultaneously linear and cyclical nature of time. History travels in Hegelian spirals, ever repeating yet ever moving in some direction. This direction, Sun Blood Stories (and our own inborn inclinations) posits, is toward utter annihilation invoking Manhattan project spearhead, Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic interpretation of Vishnu’s words in the Bhagavad-Gita “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Time is an obsession of Sun Blood Stories, which given their propensity for drone, makes a lot of sense. They zoom in on a moment breaking down notes into their undulating reverberations as they exegete tone beyond a notes placement on a page. In “Time Like Smoke” (the longest track on the album), the image of smoke’s scintillating expansion holds the listener within it’s own limbo. Sounds, not necessarily discordant, but only secondarily connected rabbit trail off into unknown spaces alongside the main, ethereal melody in a similar manner to Boris’ drone masterpiece, Flood.

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My imaginary award for Best Local Performance of Treefort 2017 has to go to the psychedelic space rock outfit Sun Blood Stories and their performance at the Linen Building on Friday night, with a set that, despite being extremely ear-searing and chock full of bizarre sounds and instrumental tones, also came through with ample amounts of charisma and serious left-hooks, most notably their blazing, bizarre, yet endearing psych-rap-rock cover of Beyoncé and Jack White’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” which closed their set out with the sort of consummate charm and audience bewilderment other performers could only hope of one day achieving. It was one of a few sets I caught where the band members and the audience seemed to be competing with each other to see who could be more intoxicated, which only served to enhance the strong feeling of togetherness.

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A sweet venue just west of the main stage, the Linen Building lands one of Boise’s best local bands-Sun Blood Stories. These rockers are an amalgamation of psychedelic rock and spiritual journey and with a nice bar setup in the back you’ll definitely want a cocktail in hand for this excellent set. Set to release their latest album It Runs Around The Room With Us next month, Sun Blood Stories is sure to blow the roof off the place with some amazing new tracks.

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Boise, Idaho, psychedelic experimentalists Sun Blood Stories recently succeeded crowdfunding a vinyl release for their upcoming album, It Runs Around the Room with Us, raising over $1,300 in about eight hours. In the interest of full disclosure, I also contributed to it. Having previously heard the track “The Great Destroyer,” for which you can see their brand new video below, I knew it was a cause worth supporting, never mind the ongoing thrills their 2015 outing, Twilight Midnight Morning (review here), has on offer. Like I said, they met their goal handily, and decided to donate the overflow to the Sacred Stone Legal Defense Fund. Causes worth supporting all around, then.

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When the members of Sun Blood Stories spoke with Boise Weekly earlier this month, they talked about a problem they encounter when performing songs from their new album, Twilight Midnight Morning (Obsolete Media Objects, 2015). They enjoy playing the material live, but other songs just don’t seem to fit into the set.

“We talked about possibly interjecting new songs,” Amber Pollard said. “We have other songs; we’ve written other songs. But this album needs these songs, and we need to play it this way. It doesn’t work any other [way].”

SBS’s album release show at Neurolux on June 23, supported Pollard’s statement. The local quintet played through almost all of Twilight to a crowd of more than 100 people. The confident, impassioned performance suited what The Obelisk called the “vitality and adventurousness” of the album.

Sun Blood Stories on its journey to the end of the night
Photo: Ben Schultz

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Sun Blood Stories’ second album, Twilight Midnight Morning (Obsolete Media Objects, 2015), was one of the best local releases of 2015. At the El Korah Shrine on March 24, the dark psychedelic rock band played a set of songs from its upcoming third album. The spacey drones, tangled guitar lines, howled vocals and muscular rhythms sounded even fiercer and more mesmerizing than the group’s earlier material.

“I am the turner of the new soil,” sang Ben Kirby and Amber Pollard. “I am the burner of the old.”

Sun Blood Stories at El Korah Shrine Treefort 2016
Photo: Ben Schultz

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Nope, it hasn’t been all that long since the last Sun Blood Stories video — only about a month — but whatever. They keep making ’em and I’ll keep posting ’em. Interesting too how utterly different “Witch Wind,” which you can see below, is from the preceding clip for “Misery is Nebulous.” That was a seven-minute journey through human tragedy, ecological and geopolitical, while “Witch Wind” is dancing silhouettes. Yup. From visuals that make you feel sad to be alive to dancing. That pretty much sums up the scope of the Boise outfit’s 2015 long-player, Twilight Midnight Morning (review here), which I put on the other day simply because — and this is 100 percent true — I missed it. True story.

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There’s not much by way of easy viewing in the new Sun Blood Stories video. Even the included footage of peaceful suburbia, 8mm home movies and other things that aren’t war, riots, Sandra Bland, various forms of disorder and/or representations of the general awfulness of our age are tainted and made complicit by context. The message of “Misery is Nebulous” is not at all nebulous: You do not have the one without the other. Or at least we as human beings living today don’t.

I’ll admit that for me placing the song in a social strata is a new context. Appearing as the penultimate cut on last year’s continually-impressive Twilight Midnight Morning (review here), “Misery is Nebulous” is surrounded by “Moon Song: Waxing” and “Moon Song: Waning” and so deep into the band’s got-weird head-trip noisefest that to me, its linear build didn’t necessarily seem to be the cathartic pulsation that the video makes it. Apart from ambient vocalizations, I’ll also add that it has no lyrics, in my own defense, and as it’s so easy to get lost in the drones and noise of the record’s back half, I guess I thought the Boise outfit — Ben Kirby, Amber Pollard, Nik Kososik (also The Western Mystics) and Jon Fust — were freaking out for freaking out’s own sake. Turns out they were being topical.

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