The sacred and the domestic have collapsed into the same room, and Status/Non-Status’ record, Big Changes, sounds exactly like that—hymnal and mundane, enormous and whispered, like a jingle dress ringing out beneath a guitar that’s looking to eat the walls. On opener “At All,” a pounding drum shuffle makes way for a grungey guitar work. The track gets more and more shoegazey as the production and vocals sound more and more buzzy, like they’re being pushed through an air conditoner fan.
Sturgeon writes songs the way you’d describe a recurring dream—precise about the feeling, loose about the details. “Peace Bomb,” adds more to a straightforward indie stadium rock vibe. The title track sinisterly circles something without naming it, a shifting and mutating spiral. What are the “Big Changes?” Personal, world, everything?
Julie Doiron appears on “Good Enough” and the song becomes briefly, devastatingly gentle before the drums really kick in. It kind of reminds me of Silversun Pickups mixed with Wilco.
On “Bones,”Sturgeon reaches backward through generations as a twinkling synth dances; the hand that reaches back is younger than his. “Bitumen Eyes,” all washed out, splits itself in two, as if a single version couldn’t contain what it needed to say. What Sturgeon has made with Big Changes is a record about surviving the present tense and all the chaos that comes with it.
