Soon after the release of their excellent Team Spirit EP in early 2010, DIY dudes Sun Hotel became favorites on New Orleans’ college campuses. While the young band’s disheveled blend of bliss, belligerence, and irreverence initially drew a litany of Pavement comparisons, their first full-length, Coast, finds them taking a page out of another indie icon’s book, Modest Mouse. Expanding on the themes of life, death, morality, and spirituality found in their previous work, here, Sun Hotel mixes vibrancy and vehemence (“Suburb”), brashness and brooding (“Loose Women”), and tension and tranquility (“Egyptian Cotton”).

Teetering between languid lulls and scathing shrieks, singer Tyler Scurlock’s vocal musings match his band’s unruly movements. At the center of his introspection, beneath Sun Hotel’s raucous energy and twenty-something angst, lies a deep-seeded religious conflict. “God keeps laughing at my plans,” he mulls on “Oikos” before wailing, “So I laugh back at him,” against a squall of crashing drums and a surge of feedback. As the disc develops, so too does Scurlock’s spite. “Closest to bilingual I ever get is praying on my knees and talking shit,” he sings on the tenuous “Rediscovery.”

At times, Scurlock’s soul-searching becomes ponderous, and Sun Hotel’s jarring movements bog down the album’s momentum. The trudging, loud-soft dynamics and meandering, multi-part harmonies of earlier tracks make the melodically morose “Seasonality” and strum-y “You (Shake)” easy to overlook, but don’t. Especially don’t skip the nasty swamp rocker “Voodoo You.” “I’ll call you, ‘baby,’ when I’m filled with hate / Our love’s gonna rust anyway,” Scurlock spews as the band bears down on the disc’s dirtiest cut. All in all, Coast is a dark, revealing, and adventurous offering; most impressive, is that this group of dorm room bros produced, mixed, and mastered the whole set themselves.