a r t i s t :: A Sunny Day In Glasgow
t i t l e :: Sea When Absent
l a b e l :: Lefse Records
g e n r e :: Alternative
e n c o d e r :: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V
s i z e :: 314.8MB
tracklist
2 In Love With Useless The Timeless 5:07
Geometry In The Tradition Of Passing
7 Never Nothing It's Alright It's Ok]) 5:04
Crazy People
releasenotes
What would shoegaze sound like if it had its eyes on the sky? Over the
of several albums, the intercontinental six-piece A Sunny Day in Glasgow have
been toying with an answer to that riddle. Their latest and best record, Sea
When Absent, has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it
sound a little bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and
pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy
Beneath dense textures, melodies pop like fireworks. Like their previous
albums, Sea When Absent doesn't sound like much else out there; genre tags are
only worth mentioning to show how they don't quite fit. It sometimes sounds
like a psych record, made not by the kids smoking up behind the bleachers but
the most devoted members of the glee club
Since their freewheeling 2007 debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal, A Sunny Day
in Glasgow have flown under the radar, apart from any discernible trends
Until now, their greatest achievement has been their criminally under-heard
2009 album Ashes Grammar, a panoramic collection of pastel-soft dream-pop that
moved fluidly between ambient passages and hazy but immaculately structured
pop songs like "Failure" and "Passionate Introverts Dinosaurs)". Actually
passionate introverts" is a pretty good way to describe at least one member
of the band: the guitarist and ostensible leader Ben Daniels, a
biostatistician who moved in 2009 from Philadelphia to Australia. "I am pretty
antisocial," he said recently, when asked if he still felt connected to the
Philadelphia scene. "I know that if I were in Philly I'd still mostly be
hanging out in my apartment reading books and playing with synthesizers." That
makes sense: Even in its most ambitiously full-screen moments, A Sunny Day in
Glasgow's music has a certain bedroom-pop feel. Community often makes for
great art, but music as unique and unclassifiable as ASDIG's usually springs
from somebody shutting himself in his room and trusting his own weird way of
seeing the world
Ashes Grammar was a sprawling and occasionally drifting record, but Sea When
Absent finds the band tightening up their sound just enough, bringing the
interlocking vocals of their two singers, Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson, to
the forefront of the mix. For the first time, they've brought on an outside
producer, Jeff Zeigler War on Drugs, Kurt Vile), and though he's helped
clarify their sound, that doesn't come at the expense of complexity. Each song
on Sea When Absent structured like a maze: it's easyand dizzying in the best
wayto get lost in its twists and turns. "The Things They Do to Me" begins as
weightless, space-rock reverie and then abruptly makes a hard left into a more
pastoral earth-bound soundscape; "The Body, It Bends" pivots between an
unassuming acoustic folk tune and a song that ought to have its own laser
light show at a planetarium; a towering riff crashes down in the middle of
Boys Turn Into Girls Initiation Rites)", sudden as a summer storm. These
tonal shifts are so dynamic that they sound fresh on every listen; you could
hear these songs 100 times and they'd still find ways to catch by surprise
Music that overflows with so many ideas runs the risk of sounding cluttered
but Sea When Absent manages to avoid that pitfall. And that's pretty
impressive, given the disjointed way it was recorded: The six members of the
band Daniels, Goma, Fredrickson, drummer Adam Herndon, bassist Ryan Newmyer
and multi-instrumentalist Josh Meakim) are now scattered across Australia, New
York, and Philadelphia, and the album came together as they sent each other
snippets of songs, with creative decisions made via lengthy group email
chains. The result is an album structured in layers with many overlapping
ideas, as fragmentary and luminous as light through a prism. The sweetly
singsong-y "MTLOV Minor Keys)" has the feel of a round, with Goma and
Fredrickson's voices braided into rich harmonies. Then there's the stone-cold
gorgeous "In Love With Useless The Timeless Geometry in the Tradition of
Passing)", which flirts with moments of dissonance and glitchiness the
pre-chorus sounds like nothing so much as a poorly connected Skype call) only
to make the moments of sudden clarity feel that much more satisfying
When A Sunny Day in Glasgow put out "In Love With Useless" as a single, they
also released a lyric video for itwhich is kind of funny, because they're not
exactly a "lyrics band." Granted, they've pushed the vocals higher into the
mix this time around, but it's usually next to impossible to understand what
Goma and Fredrickson are singing. Not that it matters; ASDIG's music is more
about the experience of getting blissfully lost in a feeling, and if their
music were too literal or word-based it might take you out of that odd
dreamlike state
When Ashes Grammar came out," Daniels recently recalled, "I thought it was a
really loud rock record for a year, and then a friend was like, 'This is
really chilled-out and ambient.'" With Sea When Absent, A Sunny Day in Glasgow
have finally made that loud rock recordfull of crashing percussion and
screaming guitarsbut without abandoning the ambiance that makes them so
distinct. Sea When Absent has the quality of one of those spectacularly bright
summer days when they color in everything seems a little over-saturated, and
it induces the same dizzy, woozy feeling you get after staring directly at the
sun. Play it loud enough to see spots
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