Sun City Girls: "Blue West"

So it’s goodbye forever to the Sun City Girls. 27 years after making a pact to remain kings of the psychedelic folk trios, Alan Bishop, Richard Bishop, and Charles Gocher have finally called it a day—but not before one final act of rebellion by releasing their most commercial record on their deathbed. Funeral Mariachi, the band’s almost-fiftieth album, is a posthumous shift in styles: short on input from drummer Gocher who died in 2007, the Bishop brothers cleaned up the demos to serve as an introduction to Planet SCG, and entice new fans into their back catalogue (45 records, 25 cassettes, and one dozen seven-inch bootlegs: now that, Bonds of London, is a catalogue). Die-hards might be lighting torches at the thought of SCG brushing with the mainstream—come rain, shine, or El Niño, you could always depend on the trio to be firmly Out There—but Funeral Mariachi is a merry last dance, and actually a pretty moving eulogy for the band who once produced such collectibles as Three Fake Female Orgasms (1991) and Bleach Has Feelings Too! (1987). In fact, it’s strange how the Bishops have toned it down given such whistleable headfucks in the past. Maybe it’s age, or maybe something inappropriate happened at Gocher’s funeral. Something involving time delay and air horns.

At the heart of Funeral Mariachi lies “Blue West”: a free-improv hash of an Ennio Morricone intro, and one where the Bishop siblings make maximum use of their chorus of humming townsfolk. Pushing the last-brothers-standing angle into overdrive, Richard and Alan use two guitars to paint pictures of dudes in the desert: one of them electric, the other not. Bishop A then builds some campfire chants around the aforementioned singing townsfolk while his brother signs off each chord with a trademark slap of his whammy bar. At this point you ideally need to be picturing Charles Bronson saying goodbye to a senorita with his eyes, as that’s the kind of drifter image “Blue West” wants to conjure. And it does conjure it, with the brief trumpet idea buried in the coda paying respectful homage to their buddy. Here’s to 27 years of bandito excellence and tapes with titles like Exotica on Five Dollars a Day. I only hope their retirement pay comes suitably adjusted for inflation.