Glasvegas – Glasvegas

Let’s strip back the hype and approach this album in an unblinkered way. The debut album from Scottish four-piece Glasvegas is a fractured and splintered contemporary view of modern Britain. Their sound takes cues from a whole range of influences, from the Joy Division aping guitars and drums to their Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” production. It’s certainly an accomplished sound, one that’s way beyond their years. Remember, it took Arcade Fire a second attempt to get this feel…

From the opening chords of ‘Flowers and Football Tops’ you get the sense that you’re listening to something special. It’s the sound of a band who aren’t content to write songs about the mundane, but about something that actually means something. There’s nothing obtuse or hidden in their songs, they’re a band who wear their hearts on their sleeves, and this is reflected in the songs. ‘Geraldine’ is a song of twisted hope and desperation about a social worker giving hope to those without it. The previously mentioned opening track deals with the heart break caused by football violence. Then there’s the recent single ‘Daddy’s Gone’ which is as brutal as songs can be, the blunt realisation that your loved ones have gone and left you all alone.

Sure, it’s a pretty bleak album with very small rays of light piercing the darkness, but it’s these small pieces of hope that keep you coming back for more. The music itself wraps around the darkness, bringing it to life. The production is perfectly complementary, allowing the songs to take on a form of their own. The fact that each songs flows into the next makes it feel like a novel. Each song a separate chapter in which you can further fall into.

It’s not all perfect though. With such a strong narrative to the songs, and such a price put on the lyrics, some of them can come across as a bit basic and, dare I say it, juvenile. Some of the songs descend into nursery rhymes, which feels a bit of a cop out considering the other inventiveness on show. Both ‘Lonesome Swan’ and ‘Go Square Go’ suffer from this and the “I’ve heard this riff before” suspicion. There’s also an overwhelming feel of melodrama with ‘Stabbed’, a spoken word piece about Glaswegian hard men over a simple piano riff. It halts the previous flowing narrative and falls surprisingly flat.

However, despite these minor infractions, this album feels like an album for now. As we seem to be heading into a dark spiral of despair with escalating violence, the credit crunch and a government that increasingly don’t seem to know their arse from their elbow, the line “There’s a storm over the horizon” makes a chilling prophecy.
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