A Year of Music

While I was trying to find a decent link for A Sunny Day In Glasgow, I spied on their MySpace page the news that they put out a new EP, TOUT NEW AGE, sometime last summer, and that it was mostly available online, at a bunch of places.

iTunes is getting much better about making indie artists’ music available DRM-free, and AAC is technically a higher-quality codec, but the vast majority of my music is encoded with LAME, and I’ve come to trust LAME-encoded MP3s more than any other lossy format. Insound wants $10.49 for a downloaded EP. Ha. eMusic does have a download store, I think, but they really want you to subscribe to their service, and their interface confuses me. Other Music Digital it is! $5.99 and no hassle!

Other Music is a boutique record store in New York. I’ve always thought of them as being an east coast counterpart to my beloved Aquarius Records, but they’re clearly trying to differentiate themselves through their eminently competent digital download store. They even have their own download manager, a cute and unobtrusive application (for both Windows and OS X) that takes a lot of the sting out of downloading multiple purchased tracks from a web site (Beatport, by contrast, has an elaborate Flash interface that cossets and constrains you right up to the point where you need to download your purchases, where it forces you to download every track one at a time, and since it’s in Flash you can’t even use an in-browser download accelerator like FlashGot).

Total time from discovering TOUT NEW AGE’s existence to having it on my computer: 20 minutes. Nice.

Not too many people seem to know about A Sunny Day in Glasgow (who have an extremely whimsical attitude towards naming – they’re not from Scotland, where it is often the furthest thing from sunny, and keep an eye out for their bizarre song titles), and that’s too bad. They have a blown-out, echo-drenched sound that combines the the clattering percussion and up-front mixing of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound with the electronic sparkliness of the Magnetic Fields (really early Magnetic Fields, back when Stephin Merritt had the knife-making Arizona woman with the pretty voice singing for him). There’s some of the experimentation of early His Name Is Alive in evidence, too, but HNIA were never quite so resolutely poppy, nor as clearly indebted to Phil Spector’s phalanx of 60s girl groups. On “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” and “One Change Into Rain is No Change at All (Talkin’ ‘Bout Us)”, in particular, all the pieces snap into focus, and the results are lethally catchy experimental pop.

On the first few listens, they might seem like some kind of nu-shoegazer unit, but really they’re not. If they’re like any other band, it’s long-gone and lamented weirdoes All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, who had a similar no-holds-barred approach to making noisy post-everything music.