Super Bazaar – The Way a Thundercloud is Happy (Album Review)

The Way a Thundercloud is Happy is an album by Super Bazaar from 2025. With 12 tracks (most of them sporting quirky titles), the album starts with ‘It’s History’. Instrumentally, it’s a carnival of strings; lively but laidback strings. Violin, (MIDI) saxophone and drums are some of the familiar instruments. The vocals (male and thick) are laid back as well, but they seem to drag the song back a bit.

If the instrumentation and vocals are laid back, it’s perhaps befitting for the lyrics to laze around as well. This is a song that looks back, if we go by the title. The lyrical persona admits to not recalling much, but they go on to give us a picture. There was drinking as well as a hint of getting high, perhaps on drugs. It’s lovely to have a chilled song, but the relaxed nature of the song can be irksome. 

It’s actually on a Tuesday in South Africa when I review this album, the next song, spotting the title, ‘Fat Tuesday’. This track has a lively dooch-dooch beat, with the piercing and thumping strings of the harp as well as those of the Rhodes keyboard, giving some melancholic feel. Vocally, we have Eric Doce’s male voice, the delivery a little bit faster and more expressive than in the first song. Storywise, we have the lyrical persona in a train car.

‘Thanks for Melting my Face’ is heavy with strings. Initially, they jump at you, which is really an unpleasant feeling. But the flute softens this harshness, giving the instrumentation a consistent flow. Of course, this instrumentation is joined by percussion and drumming by Sir Kay, enlivening the song and grounding it into something more tangible, but the percussion is on the noisy side, bringing attention to itself, an unfortunate thing. The combination of strings and percussion is, however, a masterstroke. 

Vocally, we still have Eric Doce with his lazy vocals. With talk of white smoke rising and being distilled to a science, I take these to be references of drugs. However, the song includes a humorous, if not salty clip, where Barbara Walters says, ‘I’m quick to check a bitch if she’s out of line’. 

If my earlier talk regarding the strings spoke of them as a carnival, in ‘Who Needs Heaven?’, they are joined by the strong and metallic sounds of drums. Where the strings are not jumping at you, they’re playing in a chilled and pleasant manner. This makes me think that the music here jolts you and then lulls you. 

Relying less on strings (at the beginning, that is), ‘Expose’ has delightful drumming and distortion. The vocals have some edge to them, and there’s something about them that matches the instrumentation, making for a nice pairing. However, the arrangement pushed by drumming is cut off, the energetic feel making way for a passage of strings. The lyrics are either surreal or absurd. The lyrical persona has a bed which is a ‘turntable on crates’.

At one point, they have company, and at another, they’re alone. ‘Kiss me thru the phone’, we hear. 

The lyrical persona in ‘beforeland’ says they’re down to hunger. The lyrics are sparse, and are almost an afterthought. 

This is a song with a slow buildup, strings initiating the show. Some mean-spirited and focused beat and percussion then takes over for a while, the vocals kicking on. I must admit: on an album mostly fueled by strings, it’s a breather to have some percussion. 

‘Not Another Full Moon’ is a hearty song, thanks to its full strings. 

‘I Know Nothin’ bout Nothin’ also has full strings, but what’s quite impressive is the viola. Lyrics and vocals are almost non-existent, with the singing going on for about twenty seconds in a song over four minutes.

‘Gershwin’s Quaalude’ is a song with a quirky, if not sad, title. Eric Doce is again on vocals, but the voice is buried underneath the instrumentation. That’s a rather unfortunate thing since the song has beautiful parts which are soothing. 

Vocally, ‘Parakeet’ seems to suffer the same fate as the previous one, a thing which makes me think that it must be a difficult thing to set vocals against a number of string instruments. The violin is remarkable in this song. Storywise, we have a lyrical persona who addresses someone with whom they have an ambiguous relationship.

‘Peonies for Dita’ is a harp-only instrumental. 

The album closes off with ‘Trevor 4ever’ (in memory of Trevor Bazile). This is probably an autobiographical song. ‘That harp was about to be yours’, goes the first line. Not only the harp, but the singer’s heart as well. It’s a sad song in that way, Trevor having ‘crossed the Moon’ too soon – a poetic line. In terms of the vocal delivery, the song is devoid of an artistic character. It’s more like an eulogy, if you will. Strangely, it’s about the only song Eric Doce has really tried to sing outside of his normal range, if only for a second. 

SCORE/Good: There should be a big space for chilled music in everybody’s listening radar. No doubt, there’s a lot of chill music out there, but it’s rare to have music that uses instruments such as the harp and the glockenspiel, so this album is one for the books. Lyrically, I find Eric Doce to be abstract, and this makes the listener unsure of what’s really happening. 

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