AWmusic

Despite not being released in Canada for a while, there’s a big hoo-ha going on over on the other side of the Atlantic about Glasvegas and their new debut album. The hype around this band has been bellowing out from the UK for over a year now and it’s been so loud, it can probably be heard in some distant and newly formed country beyond the reaches of whatever media group (closely tied to a record company) that happens to championing them. It’s an old story. The hyperbole has been heard before and bands have come and gone, but can Glasvegas live up to the succession of sundry superlatives or suffocate in a snowballing stockpile of senseless salutations?
As is customary in these situations, most bands can’t measure up to the ridiculous amount of ballyhoo spewed out by those who want your money and the Glasvegas album doesn’t herald rock’s second coming or even the arrival of a band that might blow all the others away. What this eponymous record does unveil is a fully formed unit making all the right moves and impressing all right people, for all the right reasons. In some respects, Glasvegas are about pressing the correct archetypal buttons for those listeners who know their rock history and want a quintessential vintage rock band, one that wears black, is influenced by 60s girl groups and dresses their music up in a wall of Spectorish harmonics. So far so Jesus and Mary Chain, but where Glasvegas distinguish themselves and show potential beyond the regular rock baggage, is in the quality of James Allan’s song writing. He may sing in a thick Scottish brogue, use phrases that many may have to look up in Urban Dictionary.com and sometimes let his lyrics degenerate into nonsensical non-sequiturs, but when the content penetrates beyond the band’s influences and their form, Glasvegas show promise that almost justifies the purple prose.
It’s songs like “It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry”, “Geraldine”, “Daddy’s Gone”, “Stabbed” and “Flowers and Football Tops” that make half the album a bona-fide classic. The remaining five songs are hardly stinkers, but in comparison to the calibre of the ones written about social workers, absent fathers, adolescent murder, getting ahead of yourself and getting stabbed, the other half of album feels like prosaic filler material. Also, when eagerly anticipated albums equal fancy producers (Rich Costey) and a big record company (Columbia) the sonic rough edges, which seem so powerful on the early recordings (check out The Home Tapes) sometimes ebb away to be replaced by re-recorded and re-balanced, standardized big-time studio productions. In the case of the songs of Glasvegas, the album versions lack the immediacy and charm of their raw and undiluted early presentations and highlight what can sometimes be lost in the unfettered rise towards stardom, buoyed on a glut of extraneous publicity.

Glasvegas – Daddys Gone
Glasvegas – Its My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry

Tags: album