Sonny & The Sunsets love tunes from the late 1950s and 1960s. This is a mythical period for music making: a time of constant invention, a rare uniting of the commercial and the creative in the music business. The top 40 was cranking out amazing songs on those weird radio things every week, records reigned supreme (and they were cheap! and record companies made money!), and every sweet, innocent chorus rang true.
But it is important to remember that just like any other time period, there were plenty of bad bands hanging around in the ’60s too, and a lot of boring imitation.
For a group deeply immersed in sounds from this period, like Sonny & The Sunsets, the connection can be both a gift and a curse. Everyone loves grooving to a swinging baseline, some easy guitar strumming, and honeyed backing vocals, but it’s hard for an artist building off these elements to establish a personality.
And thats the problem with Sonny & The Sunsets—they don’t transcend their homage to their favorite music. Playing at DC9 last Thursday (7/28), they were enjoyable but forgettable. They had fun, they were loose, they didn’t take themselves too seriously, and they were good at transferring their own affection for ’60s pop tropes to the audience.
The chorus of “Too Young To Burn” was pretty, the rhythm section in “Teenage Thugs” had some punch, “Home And Exile” had a nice upbeat jangle, “I Wanna Do It” elicited gentle sways from the audience. Despite this, nothing stood out; it was pleasant but amorphous. Sonny has a song called “Lovin’ On An Older Gal,” and for him, that gal is early rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a great gal to have, but she’s got him wrapped a little too tightly around her finger.
