Album Review Bachelor - Doomin’ Sun

A new project from the dream-pop duo of Melina Duterte (Jay Som) and Ellen Kempner (Palehound), Bachelor’s ‘Doomin’ Sun’ - also featuring guest appearances by members of Big Thief and Chastity Belt - was written during a prolific two week burst in a rental house in Topanga, California early last year. A deeply lyrical record, ‘Doomin’ Sun’ delivers a ten-song set of sexy, hot-blooded, high-stakes romance, rooted in the guitar-laden atmospherics of fuzzy, ’90s indie giants like Mazzy Star and Yo La Tengo. Melina and Ellen have chanced upon a rich vein of creativity with this auspicious collaboration, segueing seamlessly, song-by-song, between folky, high-flown meditations on celestial bodies, tangy bubblegum melodies, and blustering power-pop nostalgia. While ‘Doomin’ Sun’ glimmers with a canny musical vision that is equally adept at handling both stripped back production and thickly layered walls of sound (as on the magnificently luxuriant ‘Spin Out’), it is perhaps the open-wound lyrical content that is most captivating here. Each song pirouettes on the emotional chasm between intimate, physical union, and lonesome psychological vulnerability, with a delicate poetic language drawn from the mundane wellsprings of everyday experience. Take ‘Stay in The Car’, to give but one example, where the unassuming setting of a woman unloading her supermarket groceries becomes a charged scene of broiling sexual tension: “plastic bags digging into her wrists / blood stuck in her fingertips”. All in all, it is as engrossing as it is innocently delightful.