Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning (Independent)

Sunday mornings are meant for deep contemplation, with the early crack of light and a strong coffee helping get one through a hangover and heavy thoughts.

Bruce Wilson has had several years to ponder his pain, his recently launched Sunday Morning having come out of trying to re-create a lost journal that apparently documented a heap of tough times.

Working alongside arranger and onetime Tankhog bandmate Stephen Hamm, Wilson pleads for a purifying cloudburst on “Come the Rain”. The ballad wades through ’70s material from artists like Lou Reed and John Cale, and comes strung together by weeping strings, downer piano, and Wilson’s rough and gravelly singing voice.

The blue mood continues throughout “Can’t Find You”, which muses on loss and feeling lost, and the pedal-steel sadness that soaks the doubled-down “Drink for Two”.

Despite its nihilistic, “don’t care” spirit, “Sick in the City” is bizarrely upbeat in comparison to the rest of the album, its boogie-woogie electric piano sounding surprisingly bright-eyed.

“1986” brings things back to the gutter, with self-proclaimed “alley rat” Wilson getting soulful and sleazy above messy sax and more. Later, “Dirty South” has him claiming to be a poison-veined gator from hell, but it’s the rough female choir on micropiece “Satan’s Gonna Drag Us Down” that’s more haunting.

While it clearly mines the personal, only Wilson will know if this full-album re-creation of his long-lost journal hits as hard as the original outpouring.

With another Sunday morning coming up just around the corner, odds are he’ll be thinking about this soon enough.