A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Ashes Grammar

I should put my hands up early on and admit that I was a big fan of the whole shoegazing thing first time around. I remembering seeing Ride in a Camden pub back room so packed that sweat was dripping from the ceiling. That was bedroom indie at its finest.But Slowdive were a favourite of mine back in the early/mid-nineties too, and its fair to say A Sunny Day in Glasgow have probably got a few of their albums in their collection too. Despite the fact bands have been sounding like this ever since, the current mini revival in popularity of shoegazey stuff has seen a few of these pretenders to the old throne gaining a bit of media attention; and in the case of Philadelphia’s A Sunny Day in Glasgow, rightly so.Ashes Grammar is the band’s second album, following 2007’s critically acclaimed Scribble Mural Comic Journal. Describing themselves as “dreamy pop music”, the album consists of 22 tracks ranging from 10-second skits to six minute epics, but the whole thing flows beautifully ”“ playing it on any digital medium that puts its own little breaks between tracks will soon drive you nuts.Otherworldly and playful yet sometimes surprisingly intense, Ashes Grammar moves seamlessly from jangly and joyous celebrations to busy instrumentals or quiet interludes. The female vocal harmonies are beautifully ethereal, the musical arrangements slick and imaginative. Soundscapes give way to processed beats, which in turn lead to a slowly building wall of sound, which all echoes with a suitably gothic resonance.Apparently this album started out as a smaller amount of longer songs and I can’t help wishing it had stayed that way. As each twee indie pop moment ebbs and flows with varying degrees of electronic jiggery pokery embellishing it in the background, it just becomes something that’s on in the background rather than a collection of fully realised songs. Not much of a criticism, but I’d have loved this more as, say, 8 fully realised and independent pieces of music.I really like Ashes Grammar, and would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone liking their shoegaze dream pop lavishly embellished with sweetly sung vocals and layered electronica. But condensed to a comprehendible amount of tracks and with a couple of much bigger, more powerful moments for variety (Slowdive’s ‘Catch The Breeze’ or 'Primal' would be a good place to start), this could’ve been a classic.A Sunny Day In Glasgow on MySpace