Unlikely, yes, but the Sundays are a real touchstone band for me, and these days I seem to like them all year round. It goes like this:
(1) I constantly refer to them in thinking about and describing music made by other artists (probably only MBV, the Velvets and the Smiths come up comparably often); and
(2) Although I can’t pin it down to a single specific association, their music occupies a special place all its own in my mental/emotional/associative landscape — a place to which only the particular jangle and lilt and invocation of late afternoon sun and shadows of the Sundays can take me.
… and did you know desire’s a terrible thing, the worst that I can find?/ And did you know desire’s a terrible thing, but I rely on mine …
“Can’t Be Sure” is filled with an unmistakeable joy, edged barely perceptibly but all around with melancholy — it’s a quiet joy (and likewise the melancholy), finding voice throughout in Wheeler’s breathy expressive exhalations and climbing clear-throated refrains, but it so fills the song that it seems as if her heart must burst with it at any moment, and indeed, when things finally all overflow with the climactic call — “it’s my life, and it’s my life, and though I can’t be sure if I want any more, it will come to me later” — and last wordless emphatic exultations, they do so with an air almost of inevitability and a sense that that ending is also simultaneously a homecoming of sorts and a new beginning.
