Listening to Creative Vibrations’ new album, “Sunday Bummer”, feels a lot like the ailment it’s named for. It’s not an abrupt sadness, but a slow, creeping realization that the weekend’s flimsy sanctuary is dissolving. It’s the color of the sky turning from blue to a kind of industrial grey, the feeling of putting on work shoes that have spent two days forgetting the shape of your feet.
The Bend, Oregon outfit, led by the audibly meticulous Pete Sahaidachny, calls their sound a blend of rock, progressive, and lounge. That last one is the key. The music is often swaddled in a smooth, almost placid veneer, a sort of comfortable trap. For some reason, it brings to mind the old medical theory of miasma—the belief that disease was carried by foul-smelling air. This album feels like its own kind of dense, sweetened, musical miasma. It presents the problem (the hazy atmosphere of a world selling you a thousand useless cures) and the solution (the clear, sharp-edged progressive rock that cuts right through it).
This is Sahaidachny’s thesis, articulated through a full-band effort that feels less like a jam session and more like architectural rendering. The music dissects a culture that profits from our unease, then posits that the only true escape is to turn inward. Here, the propulsive, thoughtful engine of Richard Turgeon on drums and Wesley Kelley on bass isn’t just a rhythm section; it feels like that very “personal rhythm” the lyrics champion. It’s the steadying pulse needed to navigate the album’s complex and cynical world.
The whole thing is an antidote brewed from the very poison it describes. It’s an instruction manual for re-tuning your own internal receiver, penned by a collective—Sahaidachny, Turgeon, Kelley, Jeffrey Mallow, and Devin Farney—that clearly prizes clarity over noise. It leaves you wondering: what frequency are you designed to tune into when the Sunday static gets too loud?
