Sir Richard Bishop, guitarist of the Sun City Girls, released the instrumental album “While My Guitar Violently Bleeds” last month. The title’s variation from the song it references seems far from incidental; Charles Gocher, drummer of Sun City Girls, passed away in February, leaving behind bandmates Richard and Alan Bishop. This album marks Bishop’s first release since the band’s end. Although the material was recorded prior to Gocher’s death, the title contextualizes the music as a bold form of mourning. While the emotions on the album range widely, from the tense dread of “Zurvan” to the chaos of “Smashana”, this is an unmistakably dark release.

Listening to a guitar album requires a different sort of listening than when hearing a full band; the guitar must simultaneously evoke an ego or a protagonist as well as the world that this personality inhabits. Sometimes these elements might only be felt as an absence; a spare melody will feel lost with no sound-bed and the listener will cling to any suggestion of a melody amidst layers of ambient saturation.

Bishop plays games with the landscapes and personalities of his compositions, making “While My Guitar Gently Bleeds” a disorienting experience. As the album cover hints, this music is a masterful self-annihilation, terrifying in its graceful and single-minded drive towards the destruction of its own narrative. Melodies wander just long enough to hint at a structure, before veering off into unexpected directions. All that lingers from these teasing ventures are the formless emotions they elicit. Bishop’s melodic figures leave the listener stranded, by pulling him or her into certain moods and then dissolving without offering an escape. Perhaps this is how the album captures the mourning that its title both references and denies.

The flamenco-tinged “Zurvan” begins the album with two minutes of dramatic guitar quotes, suspending the formation of the narrative for a good while. Bishop then transforms these figures into a more organized composition; flurries of notes gradually increase in intensity, and return to the same dissonant cadence just often enough to draw these fragments together.

“Smashana” consists of disorienting, but hypnotic, guitar squeals on top of a lush bed of ambient howls and echoes. This track veers towards drone-like boredom, so it perhaps serves best as a bridge between the two more interesting pieces.

Bishop transitions out of the turbulence of “Smashana” with “Mahavidya”. At first, this twenty-five minute piece seems just as disorienting, although much more friendly; the squeals and blasts of ambience soften, as Bishop performs playful acoustic guitar fragments above undulating tambura buzzes. Like in the album’s first half, Bishop delivers a series of dramatic melodic figures that only cohere in their mood, rather than as a progression. The problematic melodic fragments, however, reveal a shade of joy missing from the rest of the album. The listener is still subjected to the same brutality and wandering emotions, but Bishop turns this aimless violence into a triumph.

Across its forty-three minutes, Bishop’s release lacks a narration and closure that one might hope to find within a statement of grief. Nonetheless Bishop still can manipulate the emotional tones of his songs through his melodic fragments. Without sacrificing its blind fury and chaos, the album eventually achieves happiness while finding neither peace nor resolution. The length of the tracks may make this album a bit difficult to access, but with serious attention, “While My Guitar Violently Bleeds” proves to be a striking listen.