Sunny Day Real Estate
Lp2 (Pink album)

THE REVIEW

When talking about Sunny Day Real Estate, we talk about one of the most underrated bands of the '90s, if not THE most underrated band. Eddy Cilia's meticulously detailed Grunge manual labels them as an amorphous discard of Seattle rock. Indeed, because they were produced by none other than the Sub Pop, home to Nirvana and Soundgarden. Meanwhile, Rumore's Rossano Lo Mele's guide on American indie rock describes them as a minor group, whose first album, Diary, is noteworthy "more for its graphics than for the music included"... So, reading through the pages of several Italian journalists, it seems like we're dealing with complete neglect.

However, there is one thing everyone agrees on, even if no one seems to consider it a major merit: Sunny Day Real Estate were the godfathers of that genre/movement now widely known as Emo. So one might wonder: were they perhaps too ahead of their time to be properly understood? Maybe it's an exaggeration... But one thing is certain: in the year 1995, no one played rock the way they did on this album: the first to have the intuition of merging the violent dynamics of Punk with the melancholy of English New Wave roots, in reverse: that is, they played New Wave as an American might, and Punk as an Englishman might; in other terms: minimal pretentiousness, but maximum complexity in crafting the song. And indeed, we're not just talking about an album of undeniable historical value, considering the dozens upon dozens of bands that have heavily plundered its ideas; we're also talking about a band with a unique style, that systematically distorted at a structural and arrangement level melodic tracks, twisting and complicating them; listen to believe tracks like "Iscarabaid" or the splendid ballad "5/4" (the title refers to the irregular time signature in which it's composed), where nothing proceeds as it begins, and everything gets lost and veers off course. And beneath this deconstruction, the aching voice of singer Jeremy Enigk, and the guitars, sometimes arpeggiated, sometimes sharp and decisive, of Dan Hoerner. A small masterpiece.

And anyway, there must be a reason if even the Mars Volta cite them as one of their major sources of inspiration, for, in their exact words, "the extraordinary ability to shake things up a bit, making the structures of tracks with strong melodic and emotional content unpredictable"...