IT’S BEEN SAID BY MORE THAN ONE TERMINALLY DOUR CULTURE CRITIC THAT TO MAKE, OR EVEN CARE ABOUT, ART IN THE WAKE OF MASS ATROCITY IS CALLOUS, BARBARIC EVEN. IF THAT’S TRUE THEN WHAT ARE WE UNFORTUNATE DENIZENS OF 2020 TO MAKE OF GLITTERER’S DECEPTIVELY UPBEAT, SYNTH-INFUSED INTROSPECTIVE ROCK MUSIC, WHICH IS STILL BEING RECORDED AND RELEASED IN THE MIDST OF GLOBAL PLAGUE? WELL, THE WORLD MAY HAVE ENDED BUT LIFE GOES ON, AND SO DOES CONSCIOUSNESS, BOTH INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE. WHICH MEANS GLITTERER STILL HAS A JOB TO DO.
Washington, D.C.,resident and northeastern Pennsylvania native Ned Russin co-fronted Title Fight for many years before the band suspended operations and Ned became Glitterer. Actually, he had always been Glitterer, just as Glitterer had always been him, but there were no Glitterer records until 2017, when the first of two self-released EPs appeared. Those were odd, charming, clever, eloquent, and highly proficient records, hand-made in the spartan bedroom-pop mode: some programmed drums and keyboards with an electric bass and a voice. The songs were about the trap of self-awareness and the impossible dream of self-negation; and despite their being, combined, all of about 18 minutes long, they left long-lasting impressions, stuck themselves in peoples’ heads and stayed put. They attracted a good amount of attention, too, because, yes, many music fans and “industry observers” knew who Ned was. But there was nevertheless a lower-stakes air around the project in those earlier days — something interesting and inchoate that Ned was fiddling with.
But then Glitterer started touring — Ned at the wheel of the rental car, a laptop full of backing tracks riding shotgun — and then came a record deal, and before you knew it there were videos and a debut full-length, Looking Through The Shades. That record came out on Anti- in the summer of 2019, a faintly remembered and much-romanticized period during which musicians were criss-crossing the world, performing live and in the flesh for crowds well in excess of five people. Recorded and co-produced by Arthur Rizk (Code Orange, Power Trip), Looking Through The Shades had a much bigger sound than the EPs — fuzzy guitars, live drums, a nice wide stereo mix befitting the best crunchy indie rock — and it had a cohesive, if somewhat oblique, visual concept that recurred in the videos, press materials, and album layout and that involved Ned going about various banal activities while wearing a red vintage Gorilla Biscuits hoodie. The album was a tight piece of work, is the point: it had vision, focus, ambition, and scope, even though, as before, most of the songs were remarkably concise and direct. It was the work of a curious and confident professional musician engaging perspicaciously with the world as it (then) was.
We all know what has happened since: across-the-board erasure of every single presupposition and condition-to-be-taken-for-granted. A sudden and comprehensive blanking of the slate. A whole new world and a whole new metaphysical terrain. And into this new context of no context comes the second Glitterer full-length album, Life is Not A Lesson, out on Anti- this February.
This time Ned has produced the record himself, notwithstanding some recording and performance help from his twin brother, Ben, and some other friends, as well as mixing and mastering by Rizk. Would it surprise you to hear that, irrespective of worldly doom and gloom, the new songs are even catchier and bigger-sounding than the Looking Through the Shades material? With roomier drums and more electric-guitars-per-square-inch than ever, Life is Not a Lesson has a way of evoking an alternate-universe version of Guided By Voices, one with a hardcore-punk background. And if there was, perhaps, an indirect or “meta” aspect to the pop appeal of Glitterer’s older records, there’s essentially none of that here: this is Glitterer’s most insistently and proudly accessible work. To wit: the single “Didn’t Want It,” a slowed-down, fuzzed-out invocation of Sebadoh’s driving infectiousness circa Bakesale and an unsentimental ode to abandoned ambitions (“Didn’t want to want it all / Found a word, made me feel small … Didn’t want it / Did I now?”).
Lyrically, as with the prior catalog, many of the songs on the new record are short, dialectical considerations of the countless daily miniature panic attacks that attend the rigorously examined life. Take, as a prime example, the epistemological riddle “Are You Sure? (“Feel it in my spine / Certainty is mine / Are you sure?”), whose arrangement combines the tension-building properties of GBV’s “Hot Freaks” with the tension-resolving blast of something like “Gouge Away” (that’s the song, not the band). Life is Not a Lesson proves to be a rigorous reckoning with the life of the mind at a time when there’s not much life outside the mind.
Of course we should make and cherish art in the wake of human tragedies. Those who say otherwise make the mistake, common among too-clever-by-half critical theoreticians, of assuming that art is only ever about prestige, propriety, and good taste — a frivolous social game played by elites with nothing on the line. The truth is that art — the real thing, the good stuff — might be the only part of modern life that isn’t barbaric. The darkest and deadliest events in our history, like the manifold calamities of 2020, aren’t pieces of an academic puzzle to be pondered from a safe remove. Tragedy is not “material”; it’s life. Life is not a lesson; it’s life. And life goes on. Knowing that, all we can do is heed the title track of Glitterer’s new album (maybe the closest thing to an intellectual manifesto that we’ll ever get from Ned Russin): “Think aloud / Inherit doubt / Build another bridge for them to burn / Run away / Speak slowly / Life is not a lesson to be learned.”
Since 2018, the Baltimore-based punk group has expanded their eclectic songwriting pallet and energized their live show, effortlessly oozing personality with each forward step. Truth Cult’s self-titled EP (Advanced Perspective) and debut full-length Off Fire (Pop Wig) demanded attention with the infectious vocal interplay of Paris Roberts and Emily Ferrara. Enter: Walk the Wheel, their second collaboration with Pop Wig Records—a multi-faceted album exploring new melodic depths.
“[Walk the Wheel] is intentionally all over the board to show off different perspectives,” states Ferrara. “Every song stands on its own with its own feeling.” Truth Cult—consisting of Ferrara on bass and vocals, vocalist Roberts, guitarist Ian Marshall, and drummer Robin Zeijlon—is fearless. Hardcore numbers like “Squeeze” and “Clearskin” are answered by radio-ready hooks in “Resurrection” and “Naked in the End,” then refuted by the hypnotic anti-pop of “Medicine.” Tied together with Roberts’ Westerberg-esque bravado, the result is an emotionally sweeping work, finding cohesion in dialogue with itself.
Recorded live at the Magpie Cage with producer J. Robbins, Walk the Wheel captures the band in its element. “I think it’s important to experience the band via live performance,” Ferrara notes. “The performance provides a clear path when sound spills myriad directions.” Like a Truth Cult show, Marshall’s noisy interludes happen organically in real-time (“Heavy Water,” “Ain’t Rubbin’ No Shoulders”)—and while his guitar style belongs to a regional tradition, he owes just as much to the Jam and MC5 as he does to Lungfish.
Walk the Wheel is topically timeless, influenced by loss, recreational drug use, and the Garden of Eden. Like their music, Truth Cult embraces all that life has to offer; they remain composed in the face of risk and new experiences. Coming off the Turnstile Love Connection Tour and the addition of guitarist Michael French, Ferrara hopes Truth Cult continues to “draw new lines in the margins of subculture and hardcore.”
Advertisement is a six-piece rock band based out of Los Angeles and Seattle. Their 2020 LP American Advertisement received significant critical praise, with NME championing the band’s “Rolling Stones-sized swagger,” and heralding American Advertisement “one of the best debut albums to come out of the US in 2020,” and Pitchfork celebrating the band’s “knack for surrealist vignettes that distort and pervert American fantasies.” Employing a cheeky, not-quite-cerebral blend of krautrock rhythms, pop experimentalism, and evil dandy attitude, Advertisement presents an unusual take on rock music, as notable for its sideways sense of humor as it is for its straight-to-the-point songwriting. Well-regarded for their immersive live show, Advertisement has opened for and toured alongside the likes of The War on Drugs, Sheer Mag, Protomartyr, Narrow Head, Surfbort, and Spiritual Cramp. Since the release of American Advertisement, Advertisement has put out a self-released 4-song EP, “Freedom,” as well as two stand-alone singles, “The Matador,” through Fire Talk Records’ subsidiary Open Tab, and “Material Man” through Hardly Art Records.
Halloween is an Ethereal Glam-Core project From Philadelphia, PA, The bands first self titled EP has a 90s flair with familiar noise, but floats off to a mix of odd external influences, deeply embedded within the group.
