Writing about music that lands in your inbox mostly at random is a bit like turning up to a gig early, on the off chance the support band might be worth checking out. (Support bands should always be checked out. Fact!) Okay, more often than not they are okay but forgettable, but now and then you find your new favourite band. Glacier finding its way under my pen is just like that, and Quality Living could very well be my new favourite band!
Still, it isn’t hard to love the beautiful noise they make, perhaps not quite power-pop but certainly a perfect blend of contagious melodies and battered sonics, the raw and ragged grooving with the infectious and accessible, as if pop music had lived through some sonic war and emerged the other side a wilder, unpredictable, and non-conformist entity. Pop music with a thousand-yard stare? I don’t even know what that means, but it would look good on the posters!
‘Stay Ugly,’ their recent single, kicks things off perfectly, everything I have described above, with added, Beach Boys-esque vocal touches and wonderfully warped guitar lines. ‘Agua Buggalo’ is pop-rock having a sugar-induced head rush, a blend of saccharine and the skewered and ‘Leaf’ is a strange Day-glo grunge explosion. (You do realise that I’m just making up genres and descriptions as I go along, which is always a good sign.)
‘Sumac Red’ is where I realise I have met the band before, and reading back what I wrote then reassuringly reminds me that they have always been difficult to do justice to in mere words, again, something that all art should aspire to.
The title track is a cinematic instrumental slowly being crushed under the weight of that titular tonnage of ice, and ‘Jacket’ rounds things off with a gorgeous, jaunty blend of alt-pop meets indie meets brooding bass meets pop-poise meets… I’ll stop there.
The gorgeous thing about the songs found on Glacier is that they might seem like a collection of cool indie/college rock tunes, and they are, but when you try to explain them in the form of a review, when you try to capture their essence in letters and words and sentences and paragraphs, you realise how much more is going on here.
As always, when in doubt, just play the damn record. You’ll thank me.
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