A Sunny Day In Glasgow - Ashes Grammar

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5...according to our Brian on Fri 11 Sep, 2009.

I recall Phil going on & on at me while I was on my extended sanity leave about this band called A Sunny Day in Glasgow. What a shite name I thought, it always rains in Glasgow doesn't it? Then, by chance, we drove through Glasgow on a sunny day on the way to Oban & my friend Rick stopped the car and we assisted him to shin up a lamppost to tear down a BNP placard some numbskull racist types had tiegripped to it (UK elections 3 years ago - hohoho) but overall, the place seemed pretty buzzing and I've met some right characters over the years from there. A Sunny Day in Glasgow, the band, are actually from Philly, USA, based around members of the Daniel's family, and make the FINEST psychedelic shoegazey dreampop you could wish for, surfing the various tidal waves of post MBV noise pop & blissed out electronic rock. On 'Ashes Grammar' some passages share affiliations with the kind of euphoric future noise that Animal Collective throw around, as well as some dancier, rhythmic leanings ala Seefeel, Flowchart et al and their subsequent viral like contemporaries such as Outhud! Throughout, there's frisky percussion, spangled guitar shapes, fervent bass thrumming, rapturous hazy vocals, eerie hypnagogic sound blurring, delirious choral pop and some of the freshest, most ecstatic sounds to explode from the universally adored dreampop canon in years, keeping it remarkably progressive & ecstatic but retaining a homely edge. This is the sound of stargaze, there's no scowling at scuffed desert boots through greasy fringes for these guys. I'm kind of reminded on a couple of tracks of when The Field Mice turned their hands to dancier material and early Saint Etienne, but with the best in today's technology being gracefully harnessed. A fabulous ride indeed! CD mainly, but we have got a tiny handful of coloured vinyl, strictly on a 1st come, 1st served basis!

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Opening with a ten second homage to Estonian composer Arvo Part, it s immediately apparent that A Sunny Day in Glasgow s new album, Ashes Grammar, is going to be a much more visceral outing than their 2007 album debut, Scribble Mural Comic Journal. It takes a few minutes for the record to even begin to reveal itself, as a swarm of 1950s acapella ( Secrets at the prom ) gives way to resonant drones, room noise, and sub bass ( Slaughter killing carnage ). It s here that Failure unexpectedly kicks in with a tribal stomp and a fluttering guitar acting as a pair of wings, lifting the circular chants of the song s melody off the ground. It s all at once joyous, insecure, and blissed-out and sounds nothing like we ve heard from A Sunny Day in Glasgow before. Ashes Grammar is far more nuanced than Scribble, but there s still a cellular logic at play throughout. The brief, shimmering loop that is Lights turns out to be the very pulse behind the sun-kissed, ambient pop of Passionate Introverts, a feel-good song perfectly suited to accompany daydreams or dancing by yourself in your bedroom. However, even at their most accessible there s always an indescribable otherworldliness flowing through the band s music, one that is fully revealed during Blood White. Like famed composer/sound experimentalist Alvin Lucier s groundbreaking piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, during this track you can practically hear the shape of the room resonating in the frequencies of voices and synths that had been amplified, recorded, replayed and recorded again and again, the undulating tones slowly drifting into a cosmic wash of bubbling electronics and guitar. Yes, in many ways this is a different group than the one we first heard back in 2007, but with Ben continuing his role as the principal songwriter, there s no doubt this Ashes Grammar could be from any other band than A Sunny Day in Glasgow. And once again, dream pop has been re-imagined.

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