The first time Tony Presley heard Sun June, it was through his apartment floor. The co-founder of up-and-coming Austin label Keeled Scales was living above Estuary Recording Facility, where the band was tracking its debut LP, Years. The album, which Keeled Scales will release June 15, retains the warmth of that initial encounter. Sun June's music is something that comes in snatches, wisps that captivate and escape the ear with all the airy weight of dust rising from an Austin floorboard on every beat of a muffled drum.
"Records," the sixth song on the LP, is a beautiful introduction to the band's sound. Like much of the album, the song is about a breakup — a recollection of the speaker's attempts to make a failed love work. With the band arrayed around her in a sun-dappled, lazy groove, singer Laura Colwell sings "I walked to your brother's house in spring / I tried to love you right."
"Records" is a spare sketch of that relationship, a simple architecture that shares the story as it's remembered more than as it was. The memories come in glimpses, and nostalgia looms large. Just over halfway through the song, the band drops out leaving Colwell and drummer Sarah Schultz building the phrase "I was on your side" out of a steady, urgent repetition. It's a tense, quiet moment that gives way to a chorus of "I tried to love you right" before fading to silence. The song could have ended there, but instead it gives way to a warm return of guitar and soft electric piano. It sounds like a shrug and a half smile — the band's easy come, easy go grandeur that seizes on every memory, holds it close, and then leaves it be with a bittersweet "oh, well."
Years comes out June 15 viaKeeled Scales.
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