As the spooky season encroaches on us further and further, those looking for an alternative from the miserable experience that is “The Monster Mash” need to look no further than AV Super Sunshine’s latest kick-ass single “Frankenstein”. Now, don’t be fooled by the title and some of its sound, it’s not a traditional Halloween song (if it’s even able to quantify it as that), and like any AV Super Sunshine song, it’s not traditional in any singular way. It’s got this aggressive lumbering sound with its shaggy guitar and thumping drum and feels like it leapt off the laboratory table. Starting off with little synth chirps that are a semi notable signature for the group, which has always been on the cutting edge of combining sounds from the past and present.
It’s a shaggy dog kind of a song with the lead singer languishing that he’s your Gaga, but not the radio kind (a cute reference to the Freddie Mercury hit), and there’s an almost counter culture presence to it with lines like “Daddy hates the songs I like”. In ways, it feels like AV is singing about the contradictions that make us these cobbled together creatures. Almost in defiance of any opposition they’re faced with, he sings “So light up your torches, rev up your porches, so darn lovely I am your Frankenstein”. Sometimes AV songs have a habit of not making sense on a literal level. They’re often avant-garde and very abstract and most of the time with their single releases, I’d call them more mood pieces than easy decipherable work. This one however does have a very strong twinge of a personal side to it with AV singing about how “In Malibu California, or like Beverly I drove my Dad’s Rolls Royce and it was very easy”.
The way he goes in depth on the cars inner workings feels like someone examining a body that there’s this unsettling feeling as the descriptions keep coming in full force. Even evoking that particular car depending on the year he’s referring to, a Rolls Royce is somewhat of a sinister car in a lot of pop culture connotations. It’s what makes its juxtaposition against people “revving up their porches” as he says so effective. The porches are the “simple clean townsfolk ”, and AV in the Rolls Royce has come to raise hell all along the west coast. The sound of the song has a ghoulish and devilish attitude, but AV’s vocals have this kind of laid back attitude that make it almost unnerving. His performance contains a swagger like The Rolling Stones, but lyrics and a vibe like early Pink Floyd.
AV continue to be an extremely underrated act though they’ve been attaining some seriously stellar radio play and appearances on shows like “The Kelly Clarkson Show”. It’s not a song made to scare the kids, but it’s a battle cry to raise hell on eerie nights and that we have the chance to be the thing that goes bump in the night.
Claire Uebelacker
The music of AV Super Sunshine has been heard all over the world in partnership with the radio plugging services offered by Musik and Film Radio Promotions Division. Learn more https://musikandfilm.com