Local Review: Sunhills – Planetarium

Sunhills
Planetarium
Self-Released
Street: 09.07
Sunhills = Slowdive + Beach House

It was in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000 waited in silence as Dave Bowman called for him to “open the pod bay doors please, HAL,” his pod carrying the lifeless body of his crewmate, waiting to be let back into the spaceship. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave,” HAL finally responds. It’s a moment of true terror as you and Bowman realize together that HAL, who is in control of the ship and single-handedly just killed off the rest of the crew, is conclusively admitting his evil motive. 

I thought of the scene while listening to lead singer Drew Nicholson’s buttery floating falsetto, as he sang in Planetarium over a spacious wall of shoegaze. Lyrically, he perfectly captures the anxieties of the average young person on a daily basis: struggling to improve themselves and keep those they love close, even amongst their mind’s own corruptions—their mind, driving the ship and they unable to trust their pilot. 

The time when Matthew McConaughey navigated his way through a four-dimensional tesseract in Interstellar also came to mind. He found himself there after tackling a huge mission in space, leaving behind the ones he loved most in order to save them and his dying world. Instead, he found himself in need of saving. From inside the black hole, he wails, “Don’t let me leave, Murph!”  

Sunhills said with Planetarium that “Self Improvement is Hard,” which is the title of the second track. But further, they said through the lyricism and instrumentalism that it’s rocket science. It’s a revolving door that makes a person feel like a stranger in their own mind, unable to tell whether their perception of the world, their situation or love is what they think it is, or if it’s instead all completely fake. I think the spacemen in each film were going through some version of this, and they actually knew rocket science. 

Incidentally, just two weeks before Planetarium’s release, two NASA astronauts were deemed stuck in space for much longer than anticipated. What should have been a weeklong test flight became an eight-month long holdout for their home, and they’ll be stuck at the International Space Station for months as of this publish date. As I was swooning through the album, I thought of them, wondering if their minds are full of these same thoughts of self-reflection, love and love lost that Nicholson sings about.  

Planetarium is glittered with samples that seemingly come from mission control, consistently poking the eerie feeling of “sitting in a tin can, far above the world,” as David Bowie put it. But the ethereal solos and unstoppable outros by lead guitarist Cameron Zitting and Nicholson carry the anxiety away. “Dizzy Dome,” the fourth track of the album, and “Saturn,” the seventh, are completely instrumental interludes that dose this medicine perfectly. 

In retrospect, there were romanticizing La La Land moments within the soundscapes that gave me daydreams of an actual colorful planetarium. But some lyrics were so confrontational, I found my heart beating a little faster, feeling nervous as I put myself into Nicholson’s introspective shoes to face my own reality. Maybe I was projecting my own insecurities into his lyrics, but afterward it felt like I had just finished a therapy session—a little lighter. –Mary Culbertson 

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