Records: Sunday Puncher's For Your Everchanging World

By Carl Ehrhardt

Sunday Puncher originated at Yale circa 1995. With For Your Everchanging World, the band continues to hone its challenging aesthetic vision of a world in which the raw, visceral nature of punk instrumentation is refined by narrative composition and mood. The following attempts to respond in images to the aural landscape evoked on the album:

Sunday Puncher writhes in a tumult of matter. It finds itself "earthbound" in a morass of steel, wood, electricity, and muscle. Synapses and nerves compress, expand, and threaten collision in the high voltage wind of the scientific mind. A swan, bloodied by the grind of railcar wheels, croons a hymn for your everchanging world: "Will Subdivide." Artificially designated others collide in an accident of automobiles. Crashes in the lazy drive of a black river. Steel asphalt water. A drowned echo.

Towards the heated, plaintive end of "the change," open- stringed power lines reach for the stars that have already died. Yet "life beats death": a schoolboy in a red-hot rage swallows firecrackers and watches his stomach explode. Looks in the mirror and spots the "double agent," dizzy in the heat of a spiral chase. Next, finds himself on the beach, his back to the ruins of a stony tower. "It collapsed." Each beat of his heart sends waves across the sound. Sings his chorus, then holds his breath: time flows backwards, wrapped in space. He must "decide": it weighs upon him as an iron medicine ball floating in waves of moments. His muscles explode in spasms of black bomb blasts. An attempt to drive forward this weight is lifted in the clean noise of a breath exhaled. (Turnbuckle)

Sunday Puncher play the Morse dining hall with Trans Am and the Eddie Gunther Sound on Sat., Oct. 24, at 9 p.m.

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