A Sunny Day in Glasgow “Ashes Grammar” Review
A Sunny Day in Glasgow make pop music that is as mysterious as it is beautiful. Their blend of fractured, noisy pop that weaves through their sophomore album Ashes Grammar would be an ideal soundtrack to having a nervous breakdown on a beautiful sunny day. The bristling soundscapes created by the group’s leader Ben Daniels breeze by with the lightness of air, with only occasional jaunts into different genres of music breaking up the disc’s tranquility. The first song is 10 seconds long and is dedicated to Estonian composer Avro Part, and things don’t get much more conventional in the following tracks. This is a band that obviously plays by their own rules, and it works out wonderfully on the great sophomore album Ashes Grammar.
While most of the disc is the kind of music that easily glides you off into daydreams, there are a few moments where the band puts out some great curve balls on the 22 song album. One of the best moments is the Merriweather Post Pavilion-like track “Failure,” which is downright boisterous compared to the rest of the disc. Tribal drums pound out an incessant rhythms while echo laden vocals sweep in and out of the mix. The whimsical vocals sing “Fall forward, feel failure,” before the droning electronics give way to a buzzing interlude, which helps transition into the hazy fade out. The band, which has gone through some changes since their 2007 debut album Scribble Mural, comes back even stronger with the ambient and epic collages they put together on album number two. While there are not any songs that live up to the sheer magnitude of “Failure,” the rest of the disc is best taken in one, sweeping listen, preferably in headphones. The tracks meld together and buzz and click just enough to dirty up the pretty pop melodies hidden roughly underneath.
A Sunny Day in Glasgow succeed in making music that break boundaries but still have a firm grasp of the concepts that make pop music great. Ashes Grammar is something that can suck you in through its deep and hypnotic rhythms but also stir you from your restlessness with its jarring dream pop. The group succeeds not only because they deviate from the norm, but because they create something outside the normal parameters of noise pop genre that has seemingly saturated the market as of late. No matter whether you are looking for pop music that is noisy or noisy music with a hint of pop, A Sunny Day in Glasgow are a band that is taking chances that other bands are not taking. With Ashes Grammar, the group succeeds simply by writing strong and unique songs, something that works no matter what genre you are working in.
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Also: A Sunny Day in Glasgow, BruteHeart, Whitesand/Badlands & the Bombay Sweets @ Eclipse Records