After a few years in the New York band circuit, an EP, a well-received debut LP, and extensive touring, Brooklyn rock band Sunflower Bean has been hailed as New York's "coolest new band". The trio - vocalist/bassist Julia Cumming, vocalist/guitarist Nick Kivlen and drummer Jacob Faber - recently released “I Was A Fool", a nostalgic and retro-gazing track that appears to be reinterpreting Fleetwood Mac for a new generation of listeners. Sunflower Bean may have left their hazy psych-rock trappings behind, but they clearly remain committed to repurposing "clichés that are so underdone they’d stopped being clichés.”
While many critics praised the call-and-response songs on their debut album Human Ceremony (2016), Cumming's angelic soprano was the sole voice heard on previous singles like "Easier Said" and "Wall Watcher". “I Was A Fool" serves as a delightful corrective, allowing her to float in and out of her upper register as Kivlen's filtered vocals stay grounded, distant and relatively monotonous. The song is less balanced in terms of the narrative - all Kivlen has to do is express morose regret over and over again: 'I was a fool who lost his herd/ I'm just a child who can't keep his word/ Word'. Meanwhile, Cummings fleshes out a familiar tale of heartbreak ('I was getting lost in your quicksand ... If I was blind you were heartless/ I feel for you in the darkness'), fixating on a sense of abandonment ('All I heard was silence') instead of rage or bitterness.
The prom-themed music video allows the song's tale of timeless romantic woe to lie neatly within the grammatical, visual and sonic past. For all its downcast lyricism, however, the track's guitar lines are effervescent, backed by a driving drumbeat and tamborines. The result is a romantic ballad that is kinetic, charming, and cosmetically melancholic, like a rose-tinted view of a painful past.
