My Albums of the Year: Sunflower Bean: Human Ceremony

Sunflower Bean tricked me into thinking that 2016 would be a good year. Their slick indie rock, with hints of Americana (right up my street), made me believe that 2016 would be a positive year, the year when my music taste could be characterised by something other than pale men singing about death. In a way they succeded, my favourite albums of this year only has one of them, but it's only Sunflower Bean that I could use as escapist music.

2016 was a great year for music as artists absorbed the good and the bad around them to produce some of their best wortk. That's not what I like Sunflower Bean though, they are strictly music for dreaming. Take the albums best song: 2013, a song that has the puch of a Bonnie and Clyde highway chase, or in my mind Jesse and Tulip form Preacher. With it's sweet/elemental vocals, and its scabbarous guitar, 2013 is a song that transports you to America's dusty highway's with a gun in your hand and a suitcase of money that doesn't belong to you.

That's not alll that the band has in their arsenal, the title track has the kind of dream pop Beach House makes after having a little lie down, and Come On is just straight up surf rock. Human Ceremony is an album for dreamers, listen to it in the car, and pretend you're somewhere else.