Album premiere: Sugarplum Fairies, ‘Sunday Suddenly’

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Sugarplum Fairies' Silvia Ryder
Sugarplum Fairies' Silvia Ryder

The folk noir on Sugarplum Fairies’ new album “Sunday Suddenly” comes with one foot in a European sidewalk café and the other boot on a dusty road in the vast American West. In either locale, Vienna-born, L.A.-based singer-songwriter Silvia Ryder sounds appropriately brooding; espresso in hand, journal at her side, she could be gazing at anonymous passers-by on a Parisian sidewalk nor a cactus-dotted horizon, either one. “Sunday Suddenly,” out today, is the seventh Sugarplum Fairies full-length, and the second since Ryder and collaborator Ben Bohm split in 2013. Produced by Marlon Rabenreither of Gold Star/the Sister Ruby Band (he produced Lael Neale’s “I’ll Be Your Man”), the album features guest turns from L.A.-based Scotsman Charlie Clark (gently in the background on “Blues Run the Game”), RT Valine of RT N’ the 44s (dueting with True Grit on “Dream Number Three”) and Taylor Borsuk of Skin & Bones (joining in evocatively on the last call-worthy “Blue”). The album’s Fellini-gone-West moment comes on the gauzy “Pale Vellum Dreams,” which recalls Kendra Smith meets the Dandy Warhols. Especially when paired in the music video (below) with a vintage clip from the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society’s Dream Films, it is nocturnal restlessness with shuffle.

||| Stream: “Sunday Suddenly” in its entirety:

||| Watch: The videos for “Pale Vellum Dreams” and “Escondite”