Written by: Dave Cantrell
Oh the ambivalence inherent in shoegaze. On the one hand, its roaring soaring wall-of-sound dynamic is an exhilarating thrill ride, especially when, as in A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s case (in the persons of Jen Goma and Anne Fredrickson), you’ve got that lilting female vocal presence in the center of it to provide a delicate ballast of humanity amid the chrome scorch of machinery. Shoegaze: it’s gentle and yet it’s pedal-to-the-metal. On the other hand its roaring soaring wall-of-sound dynamic is a pernicious genre trap, luring its practitioners into a prison (or prism, you might say) of prescribed sonic tics predicated on effects pedals (pressed, of course, to the metal), dreamy gauzy vocals that, because they’re considered simply another texture in the mix, can often be indecipherable, though it’s assumed they must be saying something profound since they’re surrounded by such gloriously-mixed majesty. The frequent result, unsurprisingly, is a homogeneity of sound whereby not only can bands seem indistinguishable from other bands but songs within a single band’s repertoire can blur together in a perpetually crashing wave of dramatic sameness. MBV, in other words, have a lot to answer for. A Sunny Day In Glasgow, however, as evidenced by new (fourth) album Sea When Absent, do not.
A Philadelphia band, ASDIG have (with the help of the band’s first-ever outside producer Jeff Zeigler) found a few keys to unlock the strictures, strip away the scriptures and produce a signature piece of work that both adheres to the basic tenets and allows for a webwork of singularly identifiable touches that mark out the band’s individual niche. Not that they’re one-hundred percent free of the Shields law – there are certain precepts of the flange, after all, that are inviolable and cannot be foregone – and the backend of the album does suffer a few dips into the generic pool of sweeping dynamics (though it might well be argued that it’s the paucity of unique hooks that’s the bigger culprit, a vacuum that gets filled with vocal melodies nearly indistinguishable from pop radio, most notably on “Oh, I’m A Wrecker [What To Say To Crazy People]”). Fortunately these exceptions prove, well, some sort of rule, as Sea When Absent is otherwise abundant with widescreen gems that manage to surprise while still satisfying one’s jones for mountain-scaling grandeur.
Thus on “In Love With Useless [The Timeless Geomety in the Tradition of Passing]” – clever-bordering-on-cumbersome parentheticals abound – we get the climbing vast and zooming progressions complete with glassed-in (gorgeous) vocals intersticed with a sudden burst of band architect Ben Daniels’ staccato-strummed electric midway through that would do Steve Diggle proud and that in turn leads to a just-as-sudden booming bass trough all glitched and psychedelic as if a few Black Angels had parachuted into the room. Pretty damn thrilling, I gotta tell ya. We get impending doom met square on by pleading hope and a dreamy drama of tonalities that shifts us into a higher gear, one of racing joy (“The Things They Do To Me), we get a ponderous, slow-motion waterfall of noise scythed in half by a Julian Swales-level vault of escalating guitar that seduces from all sides (“Boy Turn Into Girls [Initiation Rites]”), we get “Crushin’,” a Cocteaus tale told inside a bewitching chamber of liminal echoes and effects, twice sliced by Daniels’ startling alarm of guitar work as if some lustrous jagged shrieks of machinery have come shredding across a butterfly garden. It’s marvelous.
That guitar work (including that of multi-instrumentalist Josh Meakim) and how it’s treated in the mix, allowing its many voices their own penetrating profile rather than insisting they stay a member of the chorus’s dramatis personaæ and never stray, is, aside from Sea When Absent‘s sterling songcraft, the keenest key to ASDIG’s charisma. The instrument, in fact, is often rather brandished – not a proposition one’s accustomed to encountering when the discussion turns to all things shoegaze – meaning the band is never in danger of slipping into the sort of blistering somnolence that has afflicted past floor-starers and by the strength of what’s on offer here it’s a fair bet that that very designation may well be abandoned by album number five.
