by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
Citrus City reissued Sunforger’s Mono No Aware this year. The tape originally came out in November of 2018 and I’ve had it on repeat since. Sunforger’s spindly mixture of post-grunge, emo and slowcore is rooted in cohesion and nuance. Its lyrics are mantric and its melodies stick. Mono No Aware is downtuned and downcast, filled with melancholic musings on consciousness, death and what happens in between. The words are cautious and brooding but not quite hopeless; Sunforger navigate our complicated sentience with acceptance and introspection, grappling with dissociative existence through grounded optimism and stoic perseverance.
Sunforger is made up of Spencer Curtis, Laura Donahue, and Josef McGuinan. They’ve been at it since 2014, but Mono No Aware distills the band’s aesthetic into its most precise rendering yet. The flow on this tape is unreal. Flawless sequencing. Each track serves a purpose and it all fits. “Atlas” is that post-intro hook, “Run” the two-part centerpiece, “Mono” the revelatory finale. It’s also a quick album, only about seventeen minutes, so it plays out like one long song, much like the movement on records like Lomelda’s M for Empathy or Pink Moon or even 1000 gecs. It’s thematically united and highly memorable; one of those records you can play back in your head.
Mono No Aware quickly locks into its sonic palette, immediately sinking into distinct tunings, progressions and moods. Spencer Curtis’ ruminating verses adhere to melodies; cadenced lines on life’s toils and trials. “I’m not ready for real life/I’m not for it to be over/I’m not ready for living well/I’m not, I’m maladjusted,” Curtis exerts on “Atlas,” perhaps the record’s most dispirited track that hangs on to silver linings with calloused and cuticled fingertips. Mono No Aware is as much about pushing a boulder up a hill as it is shooting for the stars. It’s about embracing awareness, the passage of time, becoming present, making space, smiling while looking at the ground. The odds are grim but this is consciousness as we know it. As Curtis says - “Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars/On route to Mars.” Giving up is easy, might as well stick around.