Sun June embrace a rugged solitude on Bad Dream Jaguar

Sun June’s Bad Dream Jaguar – their third studio album – effortlessly blends pop and country with an indie sensibility. A little twang sneaks into the bass guitar tone on “Mixed Bag”; a pedal steel guitar wails on “Sage.” Laura Colwell writes with a cowboy’s willful ambivalence; “it ain’t nothing / but I wish it was” she sings on “16 Riders.” The tastefully restrained instrumentation meshes like water around her vocals, which retain heavy emotion despite their softness.

Bad Dream Jaguar is an album about huge emotions felt through the most mundane moments: “I’m not messed up / I’m just falling asleep singing John Prine in the car” Colwell writes. The biggest moments on the record coalesce around repeated phrases, like mantras, further contributing to the record’s sense of rugged solitude. This feeling is reflective of the record’s subject, Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury’s long-distance relationship. Bad Dream Jaguar manages to cohere around this idea while retaining an airy ambiguity.

Where their previous efforts dealt in uncertainty, this record feels more self-assured, if not always perfectly content. Colwell often writes about “everything”, a word that implies completion and continuity of experience and creates a feeling of bigness, of Texas, that permeates the album. The closeness of the vocal, produced by Dan Duszynski, brings warmth back to the mix, although sometimes not enough to give it shape or direction. The other prominent lyrical motif is the use of direct references to musical inspirations: John Prine, the Beatles, Neil Young. These mentions contextualize the band’s sound and place it within a generation of musicians reinventing the classics while paying homage to the music that made them. Sun June seems to invoke these artists like idols, finding them present in every pivotal emotional moment.

Bad Dream Jaguar reads as a meditation on separation, rather than a lamentation or condemnation. Colwell seems to address herself and her relationship from a third party’s perspective, a layer of poetry between the writing and her experience. The veracity of the writing comes from the feeling conveyed through the music, rather than any specificity in the lyrics. The titular jaguar seems to represent a haunting; a figure that shows up in dreams and mirrors, around every corner. While the album is surely born of a specific shared experience, Sun June creates enough space to leave that jaguar’s identity up to interpretation for the listener.