LOS ANGELES, CA- City of the Sun brings insane levels of swagger to instrumental guitar. Typically, instrumental music isn’t really a genre with much traction outside of elitist performance venues. I’m thinking about quasi-recitals at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, where half the people are gonna love the show more out of self-congratulatory clout chasing for their support of the arts than any authentic appreciation for what’s happening on stage.
This was not that. This was a pretty full house at the Lodge Room on the Sunday night of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day long weekend. And on stage, the gentlemen from City of the Sun were uncorking with Dick Dale inspired currents of sound that evoked the generations of ethnomusicological cross pollination—from Lebanon to Yemen to Mali to Spain to the north and southern tips of the Americas—that makes guitar such an undeniably kickass instrument.
Close your eyes and City of the Sun bathes you in a blanket of sound that triggers neurosynaptic pathways to imagery of car chases, fight scenes, steamy dancing, hot and sweaty fucking. It’s action and intensity distilled into an auditory delivery mechanism. No need to metabolize before it hits your bloodstream. Instant activation.
And that’s plugged in. When these guys switch to acoustic guitar, you get why they sound so insane when they go electric. It’s like going to the Picasso museum and seeing his early work where every image is perfect, realizing that he earned the right to deconstruct images with his cubism precisely because he had mastered every other technique. These guys are virtuosos.
If you’ve ever wanted to scream and throw your panties at a classical recital, City of the Sun gives the green light to do so. And on this particular night, the audience obliged. To an extent. I didn’t see any actual chonies fly through the air, but bodies were moving and much stoke filled the room. Especially during the long arcs that would build to an almost ecstatic crescendo.
Think of gothic architecture, the way cathedral spires draw your line of sight upward towards the sharp needle point at the top, meant to pierce the heavens bridge the barrier between the terrestrial and the divine. That’s what I was feeling at numerous moments during their set. And I don’t think that’s hyperbole. These guys are squeezing high velocity beauty out of their instruments.
You can move your body or kick back and close your eyes. It’s actually pretty fun to do the latter, to disengage from the visuals of these sexy beasts (homies are easy on the eyes) and let yourself be taken, to feel, to listen both literally and conceptually. Picture Mitch from Dazed and Confused, kicking it in 1976 on a plush bean bag with oversized headphones, eyes closed, and peaceful grin. Only here, you need no drugs. City of the Sun is the medicine.
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