(DIW Magazine)

The year the future broke

Sonny Kay’s new project is a blast from the past with a futuristic new look

Early retirement seemed like a good idea at the time to Sonny Kay, when, in the twilight of his twenties, his bands the VSS and later Subpoena The Past split up for good. Besides, Kay’s day job, running Gold Standard Laboratories, the record label he owns with good friend and fellow dub/reggae enthusiast Omar Rodriquez Lopez, guitarist of both At The Drive In and The Mars Volta, consumed pretty much every spare moment of his time and then some. Things needed to change, and Kay settled into GSL’s little warehouse office in L.A. while Lopez ran off and made hit records and toured the world.

Not surprisingly, the luster of permanent vacation wore off pretty quickly, and Kay found himself craving the road.

“I got to tour with other bands, but it’s not the same thing,” says Kay. “After a few years I was getting to the point where I was stagnating.”

As luck would have it, some of his old cohorts from the Bay area were also beginning to stew in their own stink.. A surprise phone call from Jim Anderson, former drummer of The Pattern, clued Kay into some possible treatment for his ennui – the boys were in town and ready to rock.

“I assumed it would be something I wouldn’t like very much, but I was hooked right away,” says Kay. “This little group, we all kind of click.”

Kay was particularly happy to find that Rocky Crane formerly of Dead and Gone and Creeps On Candy had signed on for guitar duties with the new band, now calling itself Year Future.
“I put out his last band’s last record,” says Kay. “I really liked it. His guitar playing was such a huge part of that band and their appeal to me.”

Kay uses the words vintage, retro and classic to describe Crane’s guitar style, which he likens to a witches brew of famously guitar-heavy bands like The Birthday Party, Bauhaus and Echo and the
Bunnymen. Crane’s ricocheting sound on Year Future’s self-titled EP makes the record at times feel like a long remix of the Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia.”

“Ricky’s playing is this weird, mish-mash of all those things in one person,” says Kay.

The members of Year Future are no spring chickens, but with age comes wisdom, or at least a good bullshit detector and an ear for what sounds good. Year future’s self-titled EP is at the same time a flash back to the good part of ‘90s indie rock and a wake up call to the kids of today. The message: stop trying so hard to be successful at music and just play the stuff.

We’re all the kind of people who want to live life, see the world and maybe leave some kind of mark behind,” says Kay, “But that last part is the least of my concerns.”