Dave Simpson 

A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Sea When Absent review – beautiful sonic collage

Listening to A Sunny Day in Glasgow's fourth album is like standing in the middle of a festival with music coming from all directions, writes Dave Simpson
  
  

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Burnished to a heavenly haze … A Sunny Day in Glasgow Photograph: PR

Twenty-two years ago, Nostradamic pop critic Simon Reynolds predicted that pop music would become a game of mix-and-match rather than great leaps forward, as artists would fuse genres and sounds together to create new music. A Sunny Day in Glasgow's fourth offering might have been the sort of thing he had in mind: listening to it is like standing in the middle of a festival with music coming from all directions. Somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and the Avalanches, the Philadelphia group hurl everything from shoegaze to dreampop into their sonic soup, garnishing it with 1960s girl-group melodies, children's voices, echo and FX-laden guitars. Fragments of lyrics – "Sometimes I feel so happy I'm in love with useless" – leap out, but words are used more as textures than text. Indeed, vocalists Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson sound like lost sisters of Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, as voice and sound are burnished to a heavenly haze.

 

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